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A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 



A SMALL BOY 
AND OTHERS 



BY 

HENRY JAMES 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1913 



-^6 zi^^ 

n/3 



CoPTRiaHT, 1913, BY 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published March, 1913 




©CI,A346020 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 



IN the attempt to place together some particu- 
lars of the early Hfe of WilHam James and 
present him in his setting, his immediate 
native and domestic air, so that any future gath- 
ered memorials of him might become the more 
intelligible and interesting, I found one of the 
consequences of my interrogation of the past assert 
itself a good deal at the expense of some of the 
others. For it was to memory in the first place 
that my main appeal for particulars had to be 
made; I had been too near a witness of my broth- 
er's beginnings of life, and too close a participant, 
by affection, admiration and sympathy, in what- 
ever touched and moved him, not to feel myself 
in possession even of a greater quantity of signifi- 
cant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance 
of history, than I could hope to express or apply. 
To recover anything like the full treasure of scat- 
tered, wasted circumstance was at the same time 
to live over the spent experience itself, so deep and 

rich and rare, with whatever sadder and sorer 

1 



2 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

intensities, even with whatever poorer and thinner 
passages, after the manner of every one's experi- 
ence; and the effect of this in turn was to find dis- 
crimination among the parts of my subject again 
and again difficult — so inseparably and beauti- 
fully they seemed to hang together and the com- 
prehensive case to decline mutilation or refuse 
to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This 
meant that aspects began to multiply and images 
to swarm, so far at least as they showed, to appre- 
ciation, as true terms and happy values; and that 
I might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my 
relation to most of them, using it for all that, as 
the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at 
the door of the past was in a word to see it open 
to me quite wide — to see the world within begin 
to "compose" with a grace of its own round the 
primary figure, see it people itself vividly and 
insistently. Such then is the circle of my com- 
memoration and so much these free and copious 
notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to 
my sense, the blest group of us, such a company 
of characters and such a picture of differences, and 
withal so fused and united and interlocked, that 
each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for pres- 
ervation, and that in respect to what I speak 
of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, 
as of a cold impiety, to find any element alto- 
gether negligible. To which I may add perhaps 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 3 

that I struggle under the drawback, innate and 
inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and 
affection in each enacted and recovered moment, 
as who should say, in the vivid image and the 
very scene; the light of the only terms in which 
life has treated me to experience. And I cherish 
the moment and evoke the image and repaint the 
scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to 
convey how prevaihngly and almost exclusively, 
during years and years, the field was animated and 
the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's 
nearness and that play of genius in him of which 
I had never had a doubt from the first. 

The "first" then — since I retrace our steps to 
the start, for the pleasure, strangely mixed though 
it be, of feeling our small feet plant themselves 
afresh and artlessly stumble forward again — the 
first began long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at 
me there as out of a thin golden haze, with all the 
charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing 
pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, 
of the flush of fife in the grey, of the wonder of 
consciousness in everything; everything having 
naturally been all the while but the abject little 
matter of course. Partly doubtless as the effect 
of a Hfe, now getting to be a tolerably long one, 
spent in the older world, I see the world of our 
childhood as very young indeed, young with its 
own juvenility as well as with ours; as if it wore 



4 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the few and light garments and had gathered in 
but the scant properties and breakable toys of 
the tenderest age, or were at the most a very un- 
formed young person, even a boisterous hobblede- 
hoy. It exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, 
and I catch its pure breath, at our infantile Al- 
bany, as the very air of long summer afternoons — 
occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, 
yet beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of 
accessible garden peaches in a Hberal backward 
territory that was still almost part of a country 
town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, 
of strange legendary domestics, inveterately but 
archaically Irish, and whose familiar remarks and 
"criticism of Hfe" were handed down, as well as 
of dim family ramifications and local allusions — 
mystifications always — that flowered into anec- 
dote as into small hard plums; tasting above all 
of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a 
softly-sighing widowed grandmother, Catherine 
Barber by birth, whose attitude was a resigned 
consciousness of complications and accretions, dis- 
pensed an hospitality seemingly as joyless as it 
was certainly boundless. What she liked, dear 
gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the 
*' fiction of the day," the novels, at that time 
promptly pirated, of Mrs. Trollope and Mrs. Gore, 
of Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Hubback and the Misses 
Kavanagh and Aguilar, whose very names are for- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 5 

gotten now, but which used to drive her away to 
quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me 
bent forward on a table with the book held out at 
a distance and a tall single candle placed, appar- 
ently not at all to her discomfort, in that age of 
sparer and braver habits, straight between the 
page and her eyes. There is a very animated allu- 
sion to one or two of her aspects in the fragment 
of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences 
of a so-called Stephen Dewhurst printed by W. J. 
(1885) in The Literary Remains of Henry James; 
a reference which has the interest of being very 
nearly as characteristic of my father himself 
(which his references in almost any connection 
were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion 
evoked. I had reached my sixteenth year when 
she died, and as my only remembered grandparent 
she touches the chord of attachment to a particu- 
lar vibration. She represented for us in our gen- 
eration the only Enghsh blood — that of both her 
own parents — flowing in our veins; I confess that 
out of that association, for reasons and reasons, I 
feel her image most beneficently bend. We were, 
as to three parts, of two other stocks; and I recall 
how from far back I reflected — for I see I must 
have been always reflecting — that, mixed as such 
a mixture, our Scotch with our Irish, might be, it 
had had still a grace to borrow from the third 
infusion or dimension. If I could freely have 



6 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

chosen moreover it was precisely from my father's 
mother that, fond votary of the finest faith in the 
vivifying and characterising force of mothers, I 
should have wished to borrow it; even while con- 
scious that Catherine Barber's own people had 
drawn breath in American air for at least two 
generations before her. Our father's father, Will- 
iam James, an Irishman and a Protestant born 
(of county Cavan) had come to America, a very 
young man and then sole of his family, shortly 
after the Revolutionary War; my father, the sec- 
ond son of the third of the marriages to which 
the country of his adoption was Hberally to help 
him, had been born in Albany in 1811. Our ma- 
ternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, Hugh 
Walsh, had reached our shores from a like Irish 
home, Killyleagh, county Down, somewhat earlier, 
in 1764, he being then nineteen; he had settled 
at Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, half way to Albany, 
where some of his descendants till lately lingered. 
Our maternal greatgrandfather on the mother's 
side — that is our mother's mother's father, Alex- 
ander Robertson of Polmont near Edinburgh — 
had likewise crossed the sea in the mid-century 
and prospered in New York very much as Hugh 
Walsh was prospering and William James was 
still more markedly to prosper, further up the Hud- 
son; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the 
course of which admirable stream I like to think 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 7 

of them. I find Alexander Robertson inscribed in 
a wee New York directory of the close of the 
century as Merchant; and our childhood in that 
city was passed, as to some of its aspects, in a 
sense of the afterglow, reduced and circumscribed, 
it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of 
his shining solidity. 

The sweet taste of Albany probably lurked most 
in its being our admired antithesis to New York; 
it was holiday, whereas New York was home; at 
least that presently came to be the relation, for 
to my very very first fleeting vision, I apprehend, 
Albany itself must have been the scene exhibited. 
Our parents had gone there for a year or two to be 
near our grandmother on their return from their 
first (that is our mother's first) visit to Europe, 
which had quite immediately followed my birth, 
which appears to have lasted some year and a 
half, and of which I shall have another word to 
say. The Albany experiment would have been 
then their first founded housekeeping, since I make 
them out to have betaken themselves for the 
winter following their marriage to the ancient 
Astor House — not indeed at that time ancient, 
but the great and appointed modern hotel of New 
York, the only one of such pretensions, and which 
somehow continued to project its massive image, 
that of a great square block of granite with vast 
dark warm interiors, across some of the later and 



8 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

more sensitive stages of my infancy. Clearly — 
or I should perhaps rather say dimly — recourse 
to that hospitality was again occasionally had by 
our parents; who had originally had it to such a 
happy end that on January 9th, 1842, my elder 
brother had come into the world there. It re- 
mained a tradition with him that our father's 
friend from an early time, R. W. Emerson, then 
happening to be in New York and under that con- 
venient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken 
upstairs" to admire and give his blessing to the 
lately-born babe who was to become the second 
American Wilham James. The blessing was to be 
renewed, I may mention, in the sense that among 
the impressions of the next early years I easily 
distinguish that of the great and urbane Emer- 
son's occasional presence in Fourteenth Street, a 
centre of many images, where the parental tent 
was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. I 
am interested for the moment, however, in iden- 
tifying the scene of our very first perceptions — of 
my very own at least, which I can here best speak 
for. 

One of these, and probably the promptest in 
order, was that of my brother's occupying a place 
in the world to which I couldn't at all aspire — to 
any approach to which in truth I seem to myself 
ever conscious of having signally forfeited a title. 
It glimmers back to me that I quite definitely and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 9 

resignedly thought of him as in the most exem- 
plary manner already beforehand with me, already 
seated at his task when the attempt to drag me 
crying and kicking to the first hour of my educa- 
tion failed on the threshold of the Dutch House 
in Albany after the fashion I have glanced at in a 
collection of other pages than these (just as I 
remember to have once borrowed a hint from our 
grandmother's "interior" in a work of imagina- 
tion). That failure of my powers or that indif- 
ference to them, my retreat shrieking from the 
Dutch House, was to leave him once for all already 
there an embodied demonstration of the possible 
— already wherever it might be that there was a 
question of my arriving, when arriving at all, be- 
latedly and ruefully; as if he had gained such an 
advance of me in his sixteen months' experience 
of the world before mine began that I never for 
all the time of childhood and youth in the least 
caught up with him or overtook him. He was 
always round the corner and out of sight, coming 
back into view but at his hours of extremest ease. 
We were never in the same schoolroom, in the 
same game, scarce even in step together or in the 
same phase at the same time; when our phases 
overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment — 
he was clean out before I had got well in. How 
far he had really at any moment dashed forward 
it is not for me now to attempt to say; what comes 



10 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

to me is that I at least hung inveterately and 
woefully back, and that this relation alike to our 
interests and to each other seemed proper and 
preappointed. I lose myself in wonder at the 
loose ways, the strange process of waste, through 
which nature and fortune may deal on occasion 
with those whose faculty for application is all and 
only in their imagination and their sensibility. 
There may be during those bewildered and brood- 
ing years so little for them to "show" that I liken 
the individual dunce — as he so often must ap- 
pear — to some commercial traveller who has lost 
the key to his packed case of samples and can 
but pass for a fool while other exhibitions go 
forward. 

I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final 
submission, though it is the faintest ghost of an 
impression and consists but of the bright blur of 
a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small 
piping shuflBling sound and suffered heat, as well 
as for the wistfulness produced by "glimmering 
squares" that were fitfully screened, though not 
to any revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet 
dominant object. This dominant object, the shep- 
herdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo — 
I recover but the alien sound of her name, which 
memory caresses only because she may have been 
of like race with her temple of learning, which 
faced my grandmother's house in North Pearl 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 11 

Street and really justified its exotic claim by its 
yellow archaic gable-end : I think of the same as of 
brick baked in the land of dykes and making a 
series of small steps from the base of the gable to 
the point. These images are subject, I confess, to 
a soft confusion — which is somehow consecrated, 
none the less, and out of which, with its shade of 
contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on 
glancing. The very flush of the uneven bricks of 
the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the 
street cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching 
umbrage — I see it all as from under trees; the 
form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, 
as steep even to the very essence of adventure, 
with a summit, and still more with a nethermost 
and riskiest incline, very far away. There lives 
in it the aspect of the other house — the other 
and much smaller than my grandmother's, con- 
veniently near it and within sight; which was 
pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my 
grandmother's was greyish-brown and very grave, 
and which must have stood back a little from the 
street, as I seem even now to swing, or at least to 
perch, on a relaxed gate of approach that was 
conceived to work by an iron chain weighted with 
a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and 
with the high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't 
they have been marble?) and fan-lighted door of 
the pinkish-red front behind me. I lose myself 



n A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

in ravishment before the marble and the pink. 
There were other houses too — one of them the 
occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles 
with my twilight of social consciousness; a call 
with my father, conveying me presumably for 
fond exhibition (since if my powers were not 
exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, 
of which I distinctly remember the lachrymose 
sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our 
aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately 
married and who, predestined to an early death, 
hovers there for me, softly spectral, in long light 
"front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the 
capital sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; 
with the remembered enhancement of her living in 
Elk Street, the name itself vaguely portentous, as 
through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exor- 
cised, and more or less under the high brow of that 
Capitol which, as aloft somewhere and beneath 
the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet 
impressive, at the end of almost any Albany vista 
of reference. I have seen other capitols since, but 
the whole majesty of the matter must have been 
then distilled into my mind — even though the 
connection was indirect and the concrete image, 
that of the primitive structure, long since preten- 
tiously and insecurely superseded — so that, later 
on, the impression was to find itself, as the phrase 
is, discounted. Had it not moreover been rein- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 13 

forced at the time, for that particular CapitoHne 
hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's hus- 
band, was a son of Mr. Martin Van Buren, and 
that he was the President? This at least led the 
imagination on — or leads in any case my present 
imagination of that one; ministering to what I 
have called the soft confusion. 

The confusion clears, however, though the soft- 
ness remains, when, ceasing to press too far back- 
ward, I meet the ampler light of conscious and 
educated httle returns to the place; for the educa- 
tion of New York, enjoyed up to my twelfth year, 
failed to blight its romantic appeal. The images I 
really distinguish flush through the maturer me- 
dium, but with the sense of them only the more 
wondrous. The other house, the house of my 
parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of 
those of our cousins, numerous at that time, who 
pre-eminently figured for us; the various brood 
presided over by my father's second sister, Cath- 
erine James, who had married at a very early age 
Captain Robert Temple, U.S.A. Both these pa- 
rents were to die young, and their children, six in 
number, the two eldest boys, were very markedly 
to people our preliminary scene; this being true in 
particular of three of them, the sharply differing 
brothers and the second sister, Mary Temple, 
radiant and rare, extinguished in her first youth, 
but after having made an impression on many 



i 



14 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to 
become in the harmonious circle, for all time, mat- 
ter of sacred legend and reference, of associated 
piety. Those and others with them were the 
numerous dawnings on which in many cases the 
deepening and final darknesses were so soon to 
follow: our father's family was to offer such a 
chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken 
promises, orphaned children. It sounds cold- 
blooded, but part of the charm of our grand- 
mother's house for us — or I should perhaps but 
speak for myself — was in its being so much and 
so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphan- 
age. The children of her lost daughters and 
daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as girls; 
on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occa- 
sionally and most trustingly looked in. Parent- 
ally bereft cousins were somehow more thrilling 
than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling 
when, in the odd fashion of that time, they were 
sent to school in New York as a preliminary to 
their being sent to school in Europe. They spent 
scraps of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, 
and I think my first childish conception of the 
enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was 
to be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk 
in the short range, that the romance of life seemed 
to lie in some constant improvisation, by vague 
overhovering authorities, of new situations and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 15 

horizons. We were intensely domesticated, yet 
for the very reason perhaps that we felt our young 
bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to 
other small plights of which we had stray glimpses 
that my first assured conception of true richness 
was that we should be sent separately off among 
cold or even cruel aliens in order to be there thril- 
lingly homesick. Homesickness was a luxury I 
remember craving from the tenderest age — a 
luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least 
prosaically, deprived. Our motherless cousin Au- 
gustus Barker came up from Albany to the Insti- 
tution Charlier — unless it was, as I suspect, a 
still earlier specimen, with a name that fades from 
me, of that type of French establishment for boys 
which then and for years after so incongruously 
flourished in New York; and though he professed a 
complete satisfaction with pleasures tasted in our 
innocent society I felt that he was engaged in a 
brave and strenuous adventure while we but 
hugged the comparatively safe shore. 



II 

WE were day-boys, William and I, at dis- 
pensaries of learning the number and 
succession of which to-day excite my 
wonder; we couldn't have changed oftener, it 
strikes me as I look back, if our presence had been 
inveterately objected to, and yet I enjoy an inward 
certainty that, my brother being vividly bright 
and I quite blankly innocuous, this reproach was 
never brought home to our house. It was an 
humiliation to me at first, small boys though we 
were, that our instructors kept being instructresses 
and thereby a grave reflection both on our attain- 
ments and our spirit. A bevy of these educative 
ladies passes before me, I still possess their names; 
as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of Miss 
Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female In- 
stitute," though at the moment of Sixth Avenue 
this latter), whose benches ind'e*ed my brother 
didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with 
gloves — I still see the elegant objects as Miss 
Rogers beat time with a long black ferule to some 
species of droning chant or chorus in which we 
spent most of our hours ; just as I see her very tall 
and straight and spare, in a light blue dress, her 

16 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 17 

firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and 
the stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over 
her. Mrs. Daly, clearly the immediate successor 
to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quite sub- 
stantial — perhaps because the sphere of her small 
influence has succeeded in not passing away, up 
to this present writing; so that in certain notes on 
New York published a few years since I was moved 
to refer to it with emotion as one of the small 
red houses on the south side of Waverley Place 
that really carry the imagination back to a van- 
ished social order. They carry mine to a stout 
red-faced lady with grey hair and a large apron, 
the latter convenience somehow suggesting, as she 
stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed 
her httle pupils as so many small shces cut from 
the loaf of life and on which she was to dab the 
butter of arithmetic and spelhng, accompanied by 
way of jam with a hght application of the practice 
of prize-giving. I recall an occasion indeed, I 
must in justice mention, when the jam really was 
thick — my only memory of a schoolf east, strange 
to say, throughout our young annals: something 
uncanny in the air of the schoolroom at the un- 
wonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables 
that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which 
the edibles were chunky and sticky. The stout 
red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name 
she bore imported — or do I think so but from the 



18 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

indescribably Irish look of her revisited house? It 
refers itseH at any rate to a New York age in 
which a little more or a little less of the colour 
was scarce notable in the general flush. 

Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss 
Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright (Lavinia D.), the next 
figures in the procession — the procession that was 
to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small 
brown snappy Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied 
us with the French tongue at home and who had 
been introduced to us as the niece — or could it 
have been the grandniece? — of the celebrated 
Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an extraordi- 
narily short cape (I Hke to recall the fashion of 
short capes) of the same stuff as her dress, and 
Merovingian sidebraids that seemed to require the 
royal crown of Fredegonde or Brunehaut to com- 
plete their effect. This final and aggravational 
representative of the compromising sex looms to 
my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature 
of an hour, in spite of her having been domiciled 
with us; whereas I think of Mademoiselle Dela- 
vigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or 
less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat- 
soled feet of Louis Philippe and of the female fig- 
ures in those volumes of Gavarni then actual, then 
contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of 
furniture that stood between the front-parlour 
windows in Fourteenth Street, together with a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 19 

set of Beranger enriched by steel engravings to 
the strange imagery of which I so wonderingly re- 
sponded that all other art of illustration, ever 
since, has been for me comparatively weak and 
cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing fo- 
lios of Nash's lithographed Mansions of England 
in the Olden Time formed a store lending itself 
particularly to distribution on the drawingroom 
carpet, with concomitant pressure to the same sur- 
face of the small student's stomach and relieving 
agitation of his backward heels. I make out that 
it had decidedly been given to Mile. Delavigne to 
represent to my first perception personal France; 
she was, besides not being at all pink or shy, oval 
and fluent and mistress somehow of the step — 
the step of levity that involved a whisk of her 
short skirts ; there she was, to the life, on the page 
of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again 
did that page in return (I speak not of course of 
the unplumbed depths of the appended text) at- 
test her own felicity. I was later on to feel — 
that is I was to learn — how many impressions 
and appearances, how large a sense of things, her 
type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of 
the large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather 
rank, I can't express it otherwise, may have been 
owing to some question of the purity of her ac- 
cent in French; it was one of her attributes and 
her grounds of appeal to us that she had come 



20 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

straight from Siberia, and it is distinct to me that 
the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, 
and without — pathetically enough ! — provoking 
the only answer, the plea that the missing Atti- 
cism would have been wasted on young barbarians. 
The Siberian note, on our inmate's part, may per- 
haps have been the least of her incongruities ; she 
was above all too big for a little job, towered over 
us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions 
hover but to lose themselves — with the successors 
to her function awaiting us a little longer. 

Meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the de- 
pressed consciousness of our still more or less quail- 
ing, educationally, beneath the female eye — and 
there was as well the deeper depth, there was the 
degrading fact, that with us Hterally consorted 
and contended Girls, that we sat and strove, even 
though we drew the line at playing with them and 
at knowing them, when not of the swarming cous- 
inship, at home — if that felt awkwardness didn't 
exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" 
appearances, his emergence from rich mystery and 
his return to it, our state was but comparatively the 
braver: he always had so much more to tell us 
than we could possibly have to tell him. On re- 
flection I see that the most completely rueful 
period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged 
itself; since the female eye last bent on us would 
have been that of Lavinia D. Wright, to our 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 21 

connection with whom a small odd reminiscence 
attaches a date. A little schoolmate displayed to 
me with pride, while the connection lasted, a beau- 
tiful coloured, a positively iridescent and gilded 
card representing the first of all the "great exhibi- 
tions" of our age, the London Crystal Palace of 
1851 — his father having lately gone out to it and 
sent him the dazzling memento. In 1851 I was 
eight years old and my brother scarce more than 
nine; in addition to which it is distinct to me in the 
first place that we were never faithful long, or for 
more than one winter, to the same studious scene, 
and in the second that among our instructors Mrs. 
Lavinia had no successor of her own sex unless I 
count Mrs. Vredenburg, of New Brighton, where 
we spent the summer of 1854, when I had reached 
the age of eleven and found myself bewildered by 
recognition of the part that "attendance at school" 
was so meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded 
long vacation. This was true at least for myself 
and my next younger brother, Wilky, who, under 
the presumption now dawning of his "community 
of pursuits" with my own, was from that moment, 
off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy 
yokefellow and playfellow. On William, charged 
with learning — I thought of him inveterately 
from our younger time as charged with learning — 
no such trick was played; he rested or roamed, that 
summer, on his accumulations; a fact which, as I 



22 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

was sure I saw these more and more richly accu- 
mulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. It 
comes back to me in truth that I had been pre- 
pared for anything by his having said to me toward 
the end of our time at Lavinia D's and with char- 
acteristic authority — his enjoyment of it coming 
from my character, I mean, quite as much as from 
his own — that that lady was a very able woman, 
as shown by the Experiments upstairs. He was 
upstairs of course, and I was down, and I scarce 
even knew what Experiments were, beyond their 
indeed requiring capability. The region of their 
performance was William's natural sphere, though 
I recall that I had a sense of peeping into it to a 
thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate 
the proper way to extinguish a candle. She firmly 
pressed the flame between her thumb and her two 
forefingers, and, on my remarking that I didn't see 
how she could do it, promptly replied that I of 
course couldn't do it myself (as he could) because 
I should be afraid. 

That reflection on my courage awakes another 
echo of the same scant season — since the test in- 
volved must have been that of our taking our way 
home through Fourth Avenue from some point 
up town, and Mrs. Wright's situation in East 
Twenty-flrst Street was such a point. The Hud- 
son River Railroad was then in course of construc- 
tion, or was being made to traverse the upper 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 23 

reaches of the city, through that part of which 
raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and 
a great shouting and waving of red flags when the 
gunpowder introduced into the rocky soil was 
about to take effect. It was our theory that our 
passage there, in the early afternoon, was beset 
with danger, and our impression that we saw frag- 
ments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to 
the earth another and yet another of the persons 
engaged or exposed. The point of honour, among 
several of us, was of course nobly to defy the dan- 
ger, and I feel again the emotion with which I both 
hoped and feared that the red flags, lurid signals 
descried from afar, would enable or compel us to 
renew the feat. That I didn't for myself invet- 
erately renew it I seem to infer from the mem- 
ory of other perambulations of the period — as to 
which I am divided between their still present 
freshness and my sense of perhaps making too 
much of these tiny particles of history. My 
stronger rule, however, I confess, and the one by 
which I must here consistently be guided, is that, 
from the moment it is a question of projecting a 
picture, no particle that counts for memory or is 
appreciable to the spirit can be too tiny, and that 
experience, in the name of which one speaks, is all 
compact of them and shining with them. There 
was at any rate another way home, with other 
appeals, which consisted of getting straight along 



M A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

westward to Broadway, a sphere of a different 
order of fascination and bristling, as I seem to 
recall, with more vivid aspects, greater curiosities 
and wonderments. The curiosity was of course 
the country-place, as I supposed it to be, on the 
northeast corner of Eighteenth Street, if I am not 
mistaken; a big brown house in *' grounds" peo- 
pled with animal life, which, little as its site may 
appear to know it to-day, lingered on into consid- 
erably later years. I have but to close my eyes 
in order to open them inwardly again, while I lean 
against the tall brown iron rails and peer through, 
to a romantic view of browsing and pecking and 
parading creatures, not numerous, but all of dis- 
tinguished appearance: two or three elegant little 
cows of refined form and colour, two or three 
nibbling fawns and a larger company, above all, 
of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless — 
though as to this I am vague — some of the com- 
moner ornaments of the barnyard. I recognise 
that the scene as I evoke it fails of grandeur; but 
it none the less had for me the note of greatness — 
all of which but shows of course what a very town- 
bred small person I was, and was to remain. 

I see myself moreover as somehow always alone 
in these and like New York fldneries and contem- 
plations, and feel how the sense of my being so, 
being at any rate master 'of my short steps, such 
as they were, through all the beguiling streets, was 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 25 

probably the very savour of each of my chance 
feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some 
wonder at the hberty of range and opportunity of 
adventure allowed to my tender age; though the 
puzzle may very well drop, after all, as I ruefully 
reflect that I couldn't have been judged at home 
reckless or adventurous. What I look back to 
as my infant license can only have had for its 
ground some timely conviction on the part of my 
elders that the only form of riot or revel ever 
known to me would be that of the visiting mind. 
Wasn't I myself for that matter even at that time 
all acutely and yet resignedly, even quite fatalis- 
tically, aware of what to think of this? I at any 
rate watch the small boy dawdle and gape again, I 
smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of 
the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative 
nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from 
him no grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient 
little image or warning of all that was to be for 
him, and he might well have been even happier 
than he was. For there was the very pattern and 
measure of all he was to demand: just to he some- 
where — almost anywhere would do — and some- 
how receive an impression or an accession, feel a 
relation or a vibration. He was to go without 
many things, ever so many — as all persons do in 
whom contemplation takes so much the place of 
action; but everywhere, in the years that came 



26 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the 
streets of great towns, in New York still for some 
time, and then for a while in London, in Paris, in 
Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to enjoy 
more than anything the so far from showy practice 
of wondering and dawdling and gaping: he was 
really, I think, much to profit by it. What it at 
all appreciably gave him — that is gave him in 
producible form — would be difficult to state; but 
it seems to him, as he even now thus indulges him- 
self, an education like another: feeling, as he has 
come to do more and more, that no education 
avails for the intelligence that doesn't stir in it 
some subjective passion, and that on the other 
hand almost anything that does so act is largely 
educative, however small a figure the process might 
make in a scheme of training. Strange indeed, 
furthermore, are some of the things that have 
stirred a subjective passion — stirred it, I mean, 
in young persons predisposed to a more or less fine 
inspired application. 



Ill 

BUT I positively dawdle and gape here — I 
catch myself in the act; so that I take up 
the thread of fond reflection that guides me 
through that mystification of the summer school, 
which I referred to a little way back, at the time 
when the Summer School as known in America 
to-day was so deep in the bosom of the future. 
The seat of acquisition I speak of must have been 
contiguous to the house we occupied — I recall it 
as most intimately and objectionably near — and 
carried on in the interest of those parents from 
New York who, in villeggiatura under the queer 
conditions of those days, with the many modern 
mitigations of the gregarious lot still unrevealed 
and the many refinements on the individual one 
still undeve],oped, welcomed almost any influence 
that might help at all to form their children to 
civility. Yet I remember that particular influence 
as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than anything 
else — as to which it must have partaken strongly 
of the general nature of New Brighton; a neigh- 
bourhood that no apt agency whatever had up to 
that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was 
indeed to remain shabbily shapeless for years; 

27 



28 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

since I recall almost as dire an impression of it re- 
ceived in the summer of 1875. I seem more or less 
to have begun life, for that matter, with impres- 
sions of New Brighton; there comes back to me 
another, considerably more infantile than that of 
1854, so infantile indeed that I wonder at its 
having stuck — that of a place called the Pavilion, 
which must have been an hotel sheltering us for 
July and August, and the form of which to childish 
retrospect, unprejudiced by later experience, was 
that of a great Greek temple shining over blue 
waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a 
great yellow pediment. The elegant image re- 
mained, though imprinted in a child so small as 
to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember, 
and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was 
long to gasp, with the sense of salt immersion 
received at her strong hands. Wonderful alto- 
gether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the 
intensity of picture recoverable from even the 
blankest and tenderest state of the little canvas. 

I connect somehow with the Pavilion period a 
visit paid with my father — who decidedly must 
have liked to take me about, I feel so rich in that 
general reminiscence — to a family whom we 
reached in what struck me as a quite lovely 
embowered place, on a very hot day, and among 
whom luxuries and eccentricities flourished to- 
gether. They were numerous, the members of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 29 

this family, they were beautiful, they partook of 
their meals, or were at the moment partaking of 
one, out of doors, and the then pre-eminent figure 
in the group was a very big Newfoundland dog on 
whose back I was put to ride. That must have 
been my first vision of the liberal life — though I 
further ask myself what my age could possibly have 
been when my weight was so fantastically far from 
hinting at later developments. But the romance 
of the hour was particularly in what I have called 
the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my 
entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and 
shoeless legs and feet, conveying somehow at the 
same time that they were not poor and destitute 
but rich and provided — just as I took their 
garden-feast for a sign of overflowing food — and 
that their state as of children of nature was a re- 
finement of freedom and grace. They were to be- 
come great and beautiful, the household of that 
glimmering vision, they were to figure historically, 
heroically, and serve great public ends ; but always, 
to my remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were 
to move through life as with the bare white feet 
of that original preferred fairness and wildness. 
This is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself 
insists on spreading — it waits at least with an air 
of its own. The rest is silence; I can — extraor- 
dinary encumbrance even for the most doating of 
parents on a morning call — but have returned 



30 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

with my father to "our hotel"; since I feel that I 
must not only to this but to a still further extent 
face the historic truth that we were for consider- 
able periods, during our earliest time, nothing less 
than hotel children. Between the far-off and the 
later phases at New Brighton stretched a series of 
summers that had seen us all regularly installed 
for a couple of months at an establishment passing 
in the view of that simpler age for a vast caravan- 
sery — the Hamilton House, on the south Long 
Island shore, so called from its nearness to the 
Fort of that name, which had Fort Lafayette, the 
Bastille of the Civil War, out in the channel before 
it and which probably cast a stronger spell upon 
the spirit of our childhood, William's and mine at 
least, than any scene presented to us up to our 
reaching our teens. 

I find that I draw from the singularly unobliter- 
ated memory of the particulars of all that experi- 
ence the power quite to glory in our shame; of so 
entrancing an interest did I feel it at the time to he 
an hotel child, and so little would I have exchanged 
my lot with that of any small person more pri- 
vately bred. We were private enough in all con- 
science, I think I must have felt, the rest of the 
year; and at what age mustn't I quite have suc- 
cumbed to the charm of the world seen in a larger 
way.^ For there, incomparably, was the chance to 
dawdle and gape; there were human appearances 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 31 

in endless variety and on the exhibition-stage of a 
piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles; 
it was even as if I had become positively conscious 
that the social scene so peopled would pretty well 
always say more to me than anything else. What 
it did say I of course but scantly understood; but I 
none the less knew it spoke, and I listened to its 
voice, I seem to recall, very much as "young 
Edwin," in Dr. Beattie's poem, listened to the roar 
of tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence 
of beetling crags and in exposure to still deeper 
abysses. I cling for the moment, however, to the 
small story of our Vredenburg summer, as we were 
for long afterwards invidiously to brand it; the 
more that it so plays its part in illustration, under 
the light of a later and happier age, of the growth, 
when not rather of the arrest, of manners and cus- 
toms roundabout our birthplace. I think we had 
never been so much as during these particular 
months disinherited of the general and public 
amenities that reinforce for the young private pre- 
cept and example — disinherited in favour of dust 
and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties 
and rumshops, of no walks and scarce more drives, 
of a repeated no less than of a strong emphasis on 
the more sordid sides of the Irish aspect in things. 
There was a castellated residence on the hill above 
us — very high I remember supposing the hill and 
very stately the structure; it had towers and views 



32 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and pretensions and belonged to a Colonel, whom 
we thought very handsome and very costumed, 
(as if befrogged and high-booted, which he couldn't 
have been at all, only ought to have been, would 
even certainly have been at a higher pitch of social 
effect,) and whose son and heir, also very handsome 
and known familiarly and endearingly as Chick, 
had a velvet coat and a pony and I think spurs, 
all luxuries we were without, and was cousin to 
boys, the De Coppets, whom we had come to know 
at our school of the previous winter and who some- 
how — doubtless partly as guests of the opulent 
Chick — hovered again about the field of idleness. 
The De Coppets, particularly in the person of 
the first-born Louis, had been a value to us, or at 
any rate to me — for though I was, in common 
with my elders then, unacquainted with the appli- 
cation of that word as I use it here, what was my 
incipient sense of persons and things, what were 
my first stirred observant and imaginative reac- 
tions, discriminations and categories, but a vague 
groping for it? The De Coppets (again as more 
especially and most impressively interpreted by 
the subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of 
being European; they had dropped during the 
scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake 
of Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard 
Pulling Jenks's select resort for young gentlemen, 
then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 33 

and had lately been present at an historic pageant 
— whether or no celebrating the annals of the 
town of Coppet I know not — in which representa- 
tives of their family had figured in armour and on 
horseback as the Barons (to our comprehension) 
de Coup or Cou. Their father was thus of the 
Canton de Vaud — only their mother had been 
native among ourselves and sister to the Colonel 
of the castellations. But what was the most vivid 
mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of 
the supersubtle Louis, was his French treatment 
of certain of our native local names, Ohio and 
Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their 
separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy 
invidious and imperturbable, so that he might 
have been Chateaubriand declaiming Les Natchez 
at Madame Recamier's — 0-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; 
a proceeding in him, a violence offered to his ser- 
ried circle of little staring and glaring New York- 
ers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and 
boot-toes, which, as it was clearly conscious, I 
recollect thinking unsurpassed for cool calm cour- 
age. Those were the right names — which we 
owed wholly to the French explorers and Jesuit 
Fathers; so much the worse for us if we vulgarly 
didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the 
consistency, the superiority, the sublimity, of the 
not at all game-playing, yet in his own way so sin- 
gularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally and in- 



34 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

corruptibly French — as, so oddly, I have known 
other persons of both sexes to be whose English 
was naturally and incorruptibly American; the 
appearance being thus that the possession of in- 
digenous English alone forms the adequate barrier 
and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queer re- 
versions observed on the part of Latinized com- 
patriots in the course of a long life — the remark- 
able drops from the quite current French or Ital- 
ian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, 
with the resulting effect of the foreign tongue used 
as a domestic and the domestic, that is the orig- 
inal American, used as a foreign tongue, or without 
inherited confidence!) 

Louis De Coppet, though theoretically Ameri- 
can and domiciled, was naturally French, and so 
pressed further home to me that *' sense of Europe" 
to which I feel that my very earliest consciousness 
waked — a perversity that will doubtless appear to 
ask for all the justification I can supply and some 
of which I shall presently attempt to give. He 
opened vistas, and I count ever as precious any- 
one, everyone, who betimes does that for the small 
straining vision; performing this oflSce never so 
much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he 
invited me to collaborate with him in the produc- 
tion of a romance which il se fit fort to get printed, 
to get published, when success, or in other words 
completion, should crown our effort. Our effort. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 35 

alas, failed of the crown, in spite of sundry solemn 
and mysterious meetings — so much devoted, I 
seem to remember, to the publishing question that 
others more fundamental dreadfully languished; 
leaving me convinced, however, that my friend 
would have got our fiction published if he could 
only have got it written. I think of my partici- 
pation in this vain dream as of the very first gage 
of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a 
gift — though quite unable to conceive my com- 
panion's ground for suspecting a gift of which I 
must at that time quite have failed to exhibit a 
single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. It 
had none the less by his overtures been hand- 
somely imputed to me; that was in a manner a 
beginning — a small start, yet not wholly unat- 
tended with bravery. Louis De Coppet, I must 
add, brought to light later on, so far as I know, 
no compositions of his own; we met him long after 
in Switzerland and eventually heard of his having 
married a young Russian lady and settled at Nice. 
If I drop on his memory this apology for a bay- 
leaf it is from the fact of his having given the 
earliest, or at least the most personal, tap to that 
pointed prefigurement of the manners of " Europe," 
which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, 
into my young allegiance, was to split the tender 
organ into such unequal halves. His the toy ham- 
mer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. 



36 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

It was as if there had been a mild magic in that 
breath, however scant, of another world; but when 
I ask myself what element of the pleasing or the 
agreeable may have glimmered through the then 
general, the outer and enveloping conditions, I 
recover many more of the connections in which 
forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of 
those in which they struggled at all successfully. 
It is for some record of the question of taste, of the 
consciousness of an aesthetic appeal, as reflected 
in forms and aspects, that I shall like best to 
testify; as the promise and the development of 
these things on our earlier American scene are 
the more interesting to trace for their doubtless 
demanding a degree of the finer attention. The 
plain and happy profusions and advances and suc- 
cesses, as one looks back, reflect themselves at 
every turn; the quick beats of material increase 
and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell 
of them and throw up their caps for them; but the 
edifying matters to recapture would be the ad- 
ventures of the "higher criticism" so far as there 
was any — and so far too as it might bear on the 
real quahty and virtue of things ; the state of man- 
ners, the terms of intercourse, the care for excel- 
lence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual 
reaction generally. However, any breasting of 
those deep waters must be but in the form for me 
of an occasional dip. It meanwhile fairly over- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 37 

takes and arrests me here as a contributive truth 
that our general medium of life in the situation I 
speak of was such as to make a large defensive 
verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and 
completely surrounded us, play more or less the 
part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide — too 
high a tide there beneath us, as I recover it, of 
the ugly and the graceless. My particular per- 
spective may magnify a little wildly — when it 
doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read 
into the great hooded and guarded resource in 
question an evidential force: as if it must really 
have played for us, so far as its narrowness and 
its exposure permitted, the part of a buffer-state 
against the wilderness immediately near, that of 
the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Inter- 
posing a little ease, didn't it interpose almost all 
the ease we knew.^^ — so that when amiable friends, 
arriving from New York by the boat, came to see 
us, there was no rural view for them but that of 
our great shame, a view of the pigs and the shanties 
and the loose planks and scattered refuse and rude 
public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle 
walk or a garden nook in afternoon shade. I re- 
call my prompt distaste, a strange precocity of 
criticism, for so much aridity — since of what 
lost Arcadia, at that age, had I really had the least 
glimpse? 

Our scant margin must have affected me more 



38 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

nobly, I should in justice add, when old Mrs. L. 
passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically 
joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest 
temperatures, which were very high that summer, 
but flitted across it in a single flowing garment, as 
we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that 
grand impertinence, I supposed, which belonged 
to "dowagers" — dowagers who were recognised 
characters and free speakers, doing and saying 
what they liked. This ancient lady was lodged 
in some outlying tract of the many-roomed 
house, which in more than one quarter stretched 
away into mystery; but the piazza, to which she 
had access, was unbroken, and whenever she 
strayed from her own territory she swam afresh 
into ours. I definitely remember that, having 
heard and perhaps read of dowagers, who, as I 
was aware, had scarce been provided for in our 
social scheme, I said to myself at first sight of 
our emphatic neighbour, a person clearly used to 
exceptional deference, *'This must be a perfect 
specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. 
The absolute first sight, however, had preceded 
the New Brighton summer, and it makes me lose 
myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities 
attendant on my having been present, as a very 
small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment 
where Mrs. L. figured in an attire that is still vivid 
to me: a blue satin gown, a long black lace shawl 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 39 

and a head-dress consisting in equally striking 
parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving 
over it and a band or fillet, whether of some 
precious metal or not I forget, keeping it in place 
by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the 
centre of her brow. Such was my first view of the 
jeronniere of our grandmothers, when not of our 
greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer at this day 
bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner 
sufficiently awful, while her knuckly white gloves 
toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette attached 
to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to 
us afterwards for a friend of my Albany grand- 
mother's it may have been as a tribute to this tie 
that she allowed me momentarily to engage her 
attention. Then it predominantly must have been 
that I knew her for a dowager — though this was a 
light in which I had never considered my grand- 
mother herself; but what I have quite lost the clue 
to is the question of my extraordinary footing in 
such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my 
elders, youthful elders but young married people, 
into which, really, my mother, as a participant, 
must have introduced me. 



IV 

IT took place in the house of our cousins Robert 
and Kitty Emmet the elder — for we were to 
have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet 
another consanguineous Robert at least; the latter 
name being naturally, among them all, of a pious, 
indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my 
father's nieces marrying three Emmet brothers, 
the first of these the Robert aforesaid. Catherine 
James, daughter of my uncle Augustus, his then 
quite recent and, as I remember her, animated 
and attractive bride, whose fair hair framed her 
pointed smile in full and far-drooping "front" 
curls, I easily evoke as my first apprehended 
image of the free and happy young woman of 
fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that ladies 
might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure 
alone. She was distinguished for nothing what- 
ever so much as for an insatiable love of the dance; 
that passion in which I think of the "good," the 
best. New York society of the time as having 
capered and champagned itself away. Her younger 
sister Gertrude, afterwards married to James — 
or more inveterately Jim — Pendleton, of Virginia, 
followed close upon her heels, literally speaking, 

40 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 41 

and though emulating her in other respects too, 
was to last, through many troubles, much longer 
(looking extraordinarily the while like the younger 
portraits of Queen Victoria) and to have much 
hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, 
in a singularly natural way, for a considerable 
collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. But I 
am solicited a moment longer by the queer little 
issues involved — as if a social light would some- 
how stream from them — in my having been 
taken, a mere mite of observation, to Kitty Em- 
met's *' grown-up" assembly. Was it that my 
mother really felt that to the scrap that I was 
other scraps would perhaps strangely adhere, to 
the extent thus of something to distinguish me by, 
nothing else probably having as yet declared itself 
— such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this 
actual ferment of memory and play of fancy, a 
retroactive vision almost intense of the faded hour 
and a fond surrender to the questions with which 
it bristles? All the female relatives on my father's 
side who reappear to me in these evocations strike 
me as having been intensely and admirably, but 
at the same time almost indescribably, natural; 
which fact connects itself for the brooding painter 
and fond analyst with fifty other matters and 
impressions, his vision of a whole social order — if 
the American scene might indeed have been said 
at that time to be positively ordered. Wasn't the 



42 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

fact that the dancing passion was so out of pro- 
portion to any social resource just one of the signs 
of the natural? — and for that matter in both 
sexes alike of the artless kindred. It was shining 
to us that Jim Pendleton had a yacht — though I 
was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was 
drawn — but the deck must have been more used 
for the "German" than for other manoeuvres, often 
doubtless under the lead of our cousin Robert, the 
eldest of the many light irresponsibles to whom 
my father was uncle: distinct to me still being 
the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble 
choreographic hero, "Bob" James to us always, 
who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion on from 
generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with 
its accent from the stiff points of his long mous- 
tache and the brightly hollow orbits of his eyes, 
helping to make of him an immemorial elegant 
skeleton. 

It is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the 
popping of corks that I see even young brides, as 
well as young grooms, originally so formed to please 
and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little 
occasion I have glanced at, vanish untimely, 
become mysterious and legendary, with such un- 
fathomed silences and significant headshakes re- 
placing the earlier concert; so that I feel how 
one's impression of so much foredoomed youthful 
levity received constant and quite thrilling in- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 43 

crease. It was of course an impression then 
obscurely gathered, but into which one was later 
on to read strange pages — to some of which I 
may find myself moved to revert. Mere mite of 
observation though I have dubbed myself, I won't 
pretend to have deciphered any of them amid 
the bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so 
suggestively spent, floated out into the region of 
Washington Place. It is round that general cen- 
tre that my richest memories of the "gay" Httle 
life in general cluster — as if it had been, for the 
circle in which I seem justified in pretending to 
have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; 
covering as it did the stretch of Broadway down 
to Canal Street, with, closer at hand, the New 
York Hotel, which figured somehow inordinately 
in our family annals (the two newer ones, the 
glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted 
and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and 
the white St. Nicholas, were much further down) 
and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of 
Twenty-third Street, only second then in the sup- 
posedly ample scheme of the regular ninth "wide" 
street. I can't indeed have moved much on that 
night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which 
I still hang fascinated; I must have kept intensely 
still in my corner, all wondering and all fearing — 
fearing notice most; and in a definite way I but 
remember the formidable interest of my so con- 



44 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

vincing dowager (to hark back for a second to 
her) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth 
was spread across the denuded room, converted 
thus into a field of frolic the prospect of which 
much excited my curiosity. I but recover the 
preparations, however, without recovering the per- 
formance; Mrs. L. and I must have been the only 
persons not shaking a foot, and premature uncon- 
sciousness clearly in my case supervened. Out of 
it peeps again the riddle, the so quaint trait de 
mceurSy of my infant participation. But I set that 
down as representative and interesting, and have 
done with it. 

The manners of the time had obviously a bon- 
homie of their own — certainly so on our particu- 
larly indulgent and humane little field; as to 
which general proposition the later applications 
and transformations of the bonhomie would be 
interesting to trace. It has lingered and fer- 
mented and earned other names, but I seem on 
the track of its prime evidence with that note of 
the sovereign ease of all the young persons with 
whom we grew up. In the after-time, as our view 
took in, with new climes and new scenes, other 
examples of the class, these were always to affect 
us as more formed and finished, more tutored and 
governessed, warned and armed at more points 
for, and doubtless often against, the social rela- 
tion; so that this prepared state on their part, and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 45 

which at first appeared but a preparation for shy- 
ness or silence or whatever other ideal of the un- 
conversable, came to be for us the normal, since 
it was the relative and not the positive, still less 
the superlative, state. No charming creatures of 
the growing girl sort were ever to be natural in the 
degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments of 
our family circle in youth; when after intervals and 
absences the impression was renewed we saw how 
right we had been about it, and I feel as if we had 
watched it for years under the apprehension and 
the vision of some inevitable change, wondering 
with an affectionate interest what effect the gen- 
eral improvement in manners might, perhaps all 
unfortunately, have upon it. I make out as I 
look back that it was really to succumb at no 
point to this complication, that it was to keep its 
really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in 
other words, when it had been the first free growth 
of the old conditions, was to pass away but with 
the passing of those themselves for whom it had 
been the sole possible expression. For it was as 
of an altogether special shade and sort that the 
New York young naturalness of our prime was 
touchingly to linger with us — so that to myself, 
at present, with only the gentle ghosts of the so 
numerous exemplars of it before me, it becomes 
the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their 
general mild mortality is laid away. We used to 



46 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

have in the after-time, amid fresh recognitions and 
reminders, the kindest *'old New York" identifi- 
cations for it. The special shade of its identity 
was thus that it was not conscious — really not 
conscious of anything in the world; or was con- 
scious of so few possibilities at least, and these so 
immediate and so a matter of course, that it came 
almost to the same thing. That was the testi- 
mony that the slight subjects in question strike 
me as having borne to their surrounding medium — 
the fact that their unconsciousness could be so 
preserved. They played about in it so happily 
and serenely and sociably, as unembarrassed and 
loquacious as they were unadmonished and unin- 
formed — only aware at the most that a good 
many people within their horizon were "dissi- 
pated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many were. 
What it was to be dissipated — that, however, 
was but in the most limited degree a feature of 
their vision; they would have held, under pressure, 
that it consisted more than anything else in get- 
ting tipsy. 

Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongru- 
ously droll, the sense somehow begotten in our- 
selves, as very young persons, of our being sur- 
rounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer 
and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember 
how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in 
the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentle- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 47 

man, all but closely consanguineous, who had come 
to call on my mother, I anticipated his further 
entrance by slipping in to report to that parent 
that I thought he must be tipsy. And I was to 
recall perfectly afterwards the impression I so 
made on her — in which the general proposition 
that the gentlemen of a certain group or connec- 
tion might on occasion be best described by the 
term I had used sought to destroy the particular 
presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his or- 
dinary measure, show himself for one of those. 
He didn't, to all appearance, for I was afterwards 
disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that 
memory remained with me, as well as a consider- 
able subsequent wonder at my having leaped to 
so baseless a view. The truth was indeed that 
we had too, in the most innocent way in the world, 
our sense of "dissipation" as an abounding ele- 
ment in family histories; a sense fed quite directly 
by our fondness for making our father — I can 
at any rate testify for the urgency of my own 
appeal to him — tell us stories of the world of his 
youth. He regaled us with no scandals, yet it 
somehow rarely failed to come out that each con- 
temporary on his younger scene, each hero of each 
thrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant 
promise and romantic charm, ended badly, as 
badly as possible. This became our gaping gen- 
eralisation — it gaped even under the moral that 



48 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the anecdote was always, and so familiarly, hu- 
manly and vividly, designed to convey: everyone 
in the little old Albany of the Dutch houses and 
the steep streets and the recurrent family names — 
Townsends, Clintons, Van Rensselaers, Pruyns: I 
pick them up again at hazard, and all uninvidiously, 
out of reverberations long since still — everyone 
without exception had at last taken a turn as far 
as possible from edifying. And what they had 
most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful 
apparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged 
my imagination, was just the fine old Albany 
drama — in the light of which a ring of mystery 
as to their lives (mainly carried on at the New 
York Hotel aforesaid) surrounded them, and their 
charm, inveterate, as I believed, shone out as 
through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. Their 
charm was in various marks of which I shall have 
more to say — for as I breathe all this hushed air 
again even the more broken things give out touch- 
ing human values and faint sweet scents of char- 
acter, flushes of old beauty and good-will. 

The grim little generalisation remained, none 
the less, and I may speak of it — since I speak of 
everything — as still standing: the striking evi- 
dence that scarce aught but disaster could, in 
that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake 
young men who were in the least exposed. Not to 
have been immediately launched in business of a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 49 

rigorous sort was to be exposed — in the absence 
I mean of some fairly abnormal predisposition to 
virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted 
that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an oflfice 
or a "store," places in which people sat close and 
made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, 
and sought only, in places in which people got 
tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the 
golden one, for it was just the ready, even when 
the moderate, possession of gold that determined, 
that hurried on, disaster. There were whole sets 
and groups, there were "sympathetic," though too 
susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognise 
or to find possible any practical application of 
moneyed, that is of transmitted, ease, however 
limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad 
with it — which meant even then going as often as 
possible to Paris. The bright and empty air was 
as void of "careers" for a choice as of cathedral 
towers for a sketcher, and I passed my younger 
time, till within a year or two of the Civil War, 
with an absolute vagueness of impression as to 
how the political life of the country was carried 
on. The field was strictly covered, to my young 
eyes, I make out, by three classes, the busy, the 
tipsy, and Daniel Webster. This last great man 
must have represented for us a class in himself; as 
if to be "political" was just to be Daniel Webster 
in his proper person and with room left over for 



50 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

nobody else. That he should have filled the sky 
of public life from pole to pole, even to a child- 
ish consciousness not formed in New England and 
for which that strenuous section was but a name 
in the geography-book, is probably indeed a sign 
of how large, in the general air, he comparatively 
loomed. The public scene was otherwise a blank 
to our young vision, I discern, till, later on, in 
Paris, I saw — for at that unimproved period 
we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to 
"meet" — Charles Sumner; with whose name in- 
deed there further connects itself the image of a 
thrilled hour in the same city some months before : 
the gathering of a group of indignant persons on 
the terrace of a small old-world hotel or pavilion 
looking out on the Avenue des Champs Elysees, 
slightly above the Rond-Point and just opposite 
the antediluvian Jardin d'Hiver (who remembers 
the Jardin d'Hiver, who remembers the ancient 
lodges of the octroi, the pair of them facing each 
other at the Barriere de I'Etoile?) and among them 
a passionate lady in tears over the news, fresh that 
morning, of the assault on Sumner by the South 
Carolina ruffian of the House. The wounded 
Senator, injured in health, had come to Europe 
later on to recuperate, and he offered me my first 
view, to the best of my belief, not only of a "states- 
man," but of any person who'msoever concerned in 
political life. I distinguish in the earlier twilight 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 51 

of Fourteenth Street my father's return to us one 
November day — we knew he had been out to 
vote — with the news that General Winfield 
Scott, his and the then *'Whig" candidate, had 
been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue 
from the same Umbo my afterwards proud Httle 
impression of having "met" that high-piled hero 
of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so 
soon and with so little ceremony to extinguish, 
literally met him, at my father's side, in Fifth 
Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross- 
street. I remain vague as to what had then hap- 
pened and scarce suppose I was, at the age prob- 
ably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must 
have been for some moments face to face while 
from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue 
military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened 
silver clasp, which spread about him like a sym- 
bol of the tented field, he greeted my parent — so 
clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape all 
the way up to where he towered aloft. 



THE not very glorious smoke of the Mexican 
War, I note for another touch, had been 
in the air when I was a still smaller boy, 
and I have an association with it that hovers 
between the definite and the dim, a vision of our 
uncle (Captain as he then was) Robert Tem- 
ple, U.S.A., in regimentals, either on his way to 
the scene of action or on the return from it. I see 
him as a person half asleep sees some large object 
across the room and against the window-light — 
even if to the effect of my now asking myself why, 
so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply 
of war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feath- 
ered too — an odd vision of dancing superior 
plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain. 
However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely 
for its value as my earliest glimpse of any circum- 
stance of the public order — unless indeed an- 
other, the reminiscence to which I owe to-day my 
sharpest sense of personal antiquity, had already 
given me the historic thrill. The scene of this 
latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an 
apartment in one of the three Fifth Avenue 
houses that were not long afterward swallowed up 

52 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 53 

in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the 
admired appearance of my uncles "Gus" and 
John James to announce to my father that the 
Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis 
Philippe had fled to England. These last words, 
the flight of the king, linger on my ear at this 
hour even as they fell there; we had somehow 
waked early to a perception of Paris, and a vibra- 
tion of my very most infantine sensibility under 
its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved 
for subsequent wondering reference. I had been 
there for a short time in the second year of my 
life, and I was to communicate to my parents later 
on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite 
to them in a carriage and on the lap of another 
person, I had been impressed with the view, 
framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we 
passed, of a great stately square surrounded with 
high-roofed houses and having in its centre a tall 
and glorious column. I had naturally caused them 
to marvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, 
forced them to compare notes, as it were, and 
reconstitute the miracle. They knew what my 
observation of monumental squares had been — 
and alas hadn't; neither New York nor Albany 
could have offered me the splendid perspective, 
and, for that matter, neither could London, which 
moreover I had known at a younger age still. 
Conveyed along the Rue St.-Honore while I wag- 



54 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

gled my small feet, as I definitely remember doing, 
under my flowing robe, I had crossed the Rue de 
Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the 
admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne 
Vendome. I don't now pretend to measure the 
extent to which my interest in the events of 1848 
— I was five years old — was quickened by that 
souvenir, a tradition further reinforced, I should 
add, by the fact that some relative or other, some 
member of our circle, was always either "there" 
("there" being of course generally Europe, but 
particularly and pointedly Paris) or going there or 
coming back from there: I at any rate revert to 
the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips 
as to my positive initiation into History. It was 
as if I had been ready for them and could catch 
on; I had heard of kings presumably, and also of 
fleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was 
a new and striking image, to which the apparent 
consternation of my elders added dramatic force. 
So much, in any case, for what I may claim — 
perhaps too idly — on behalf of my backward 
reach. 

It has carried me far from my rather evident 
proposition that if we saw the "natural" so hap- 
pily embodied about us — and in female maturity, 
or comparative maturity, scarce less than in fe- 
male adolescence — this was because the artificial, 
or in other words the complicated, was so little 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 55 

there to threaten it. The comphcated, as we were 
later on to define it, was but another name for 
those more massed and violent assaults upon the 
social sense that we were to recognise subsequently 
by their effects — observing thus that a sense 
more subtly social had so been created, and that it 
quite differed from that often almost complete 
inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, 
any constituted, order to the exhibition of which 
our earlier air and our family scene had inimitably 
treated us. We came more or less to see that our 
young contemporaries of another world, the trained 
and admonished, the disciplined and governessed, 
or in a word the formed, relatively speaking, had 
been made aware of many things of which those at 
home hadn't been; yet we were also to note — so 
far as we may be conceived as so precociously 
** noting," though we were certainly incorrigible 
observers — that, the awareness in question re- 
maining at the best imperfect, our little friends as 
distinguished from our companions of the cousin- 
ship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but 
to flounder and recede, elated at once and abashed 
and on the whole but feebly sophisticated. The 
cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and 
unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure 
serenity, sociability and loquacity; the oddest 
fact about its members being withal that it didn't 
make them bores, I seem to feel as I look back, or 



56 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

at least not worse bores than sundry specimens of 
the other growth. There can surely never have 
been anything like their good faith and, generally 
speaking, their amiability. I should have but to 
let myself go a little to wish to cite examples — 
save that in doing so I should lose sight of my 
point; which is to recall again that whether we 
were all amiable or not (and, frankly, I claim it in 
a high degree for most of us) the scene on which 
we so freely bloomed does strike me, when I 
reckon up, as extraordinarily unfurnished. How 
came it then that for the most part so simple we 
yet weren't more inane? This was doubtless by 
reason of the quantity of our inward life — ours 
of our father's house in especial I mean — which 
made an excellent, in some cases almost an incom- 
parable, fond for a thicker civility to mix with 
when growing experience should begin to take 
that in. It was also quaint, among us, I may 
be reminded, to have begun with the inward life; 
but we began, after the manner of all men, as we 
could, and I hold that if it comes to that we might 
have begun much worse. 

I was in my seventeenth year when the raid and 
the capture of John Brown, of Harper's Ferry 
fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us, 
though we were then on the other side of the 
world; and I count this as the very first reminder 
that reached me of our living, on our side, in a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 57 

political order: I had perfectly taken in from the 
pages of "Punch," which contributed in the high- 
est degree to our education, that the peoples on 
the other side so lived. As there was no American 
"Punch," and to this time has been none, to give 
small boys the sense and the imagination of living 
with their public administrators, Daniel Webster 
and Charles Sumner had never become, for my 
fancy, members of a class, a class which numbered 
in England, by John Leech's showing, so many 
other members still than Lords Brougham, Palm- 
erston and John Russell. The war of Secession, 
soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with 
features and the sense of the State, in our genera- 
tion, infinitely to quicken; but that alarm came 
upon the country like a thief at night, and we 
might all have been living in a land in which there 
seemed at least nothing save a comparatively 
small amount of quite private property to steal. 
Even private property in other than the most 
modest amounts scarce figured for our particular 
selves; which doubtless came partly from the fact 
that amid all the Albany issue there was ease, with 
the habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine 
old ability — he had decently provided for so 
large a generation; but our consciousness was posi- 
tively disfurnished, as that of young Americans 
went, of the actualities of "business" in a world of 
business. As to that we all formed together quite 



58 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

a monstrous exception; business in a world of busi- 
ness was the thing we most agreed (differ as we 
might on minor issues) in knowing nothing about. 
We touched it and it touched us neither directly 
nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, 
not to say our helpless ignorance and on occasion 
(since I can speak for one fine instance) our settled 
density of understanding, made us an unexampled 
and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the 
American heaven, a lamentable case. Of course 
even the office and the "store" leave much of the 
provision for an approximately complete scheme 
of manners to be accounted for; still there must 
have been vast numbers of people about us for 
whom, under the usages, the assault on the imag- 
ination from without was much stronger and the 
fiUing-in of the general picture much richer. It 
was exactly by the lack of that filling-in that we — 
we more especially who lived at near view of my 
father's admirable example — had been thrown 
so upon the inward life. No one could ever have 
taken to it, even in the face of discouragement, 
more kindly and naturally than he; but the situa- 
tion had at least that charm that, in default of so 
many kinds of the outward, people had their choice 
of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and 
might practise those kinds with whatever consis- 
tency, intensity and brilliancy. Of our father's 
perfect gift for practising his kind I shall have 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 59 

more to say; but I meanwhile glance yet again at 
those felicities of destitution which kept us, col- 
lectively, so genially interested in almost nothing 
but each other and which come over me now as 
one of the famous blessings in disguise. 

There were "artists" in the prospect — didn't 
Mr. Tom Hicks and Mr. Paul Duggan and Mr. 
C. P. Cranch and Mr. Felix Darley, this last wor- 
thy of a wider reputation, capable perhaps even of 
a finer development, than he attained, more or less 
haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the 
sense of others, landscapist Cropseys and Coles 
and Kensetts, and bust-producing Iveses and 
Powerses and Moziers, hovering in an outer circle.'^ 
There were authors not less, some of them vague 
and female and in this case, as a rule, glossily 
ringletted and monumentally breastpinned, but 
mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of 
George Curtis and Parke Godwin and George Rip- 
ley and Charles Dana and N. P. Willis and, for 
brighter lights or those that in our then compara- 
tive obscurity almost deceived the morn, Mr. 
Bryant, Washington Irving and E. A. Poe — the 
last-named of whom I cite not so much because 
he was personally present (the extremity of per- 
sonal absence had just overtaken him) as by rea- 
son of that predominant lustre in him which our 
small opening minds themselves already recog- 
nised aiid which makes me wonder to-day at the 



60 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

legend of the native neglect of him. Was he not 
even at that time on all lips, had not my brother, 
promptly master of the subject, beckoned on my 
lagging mind with a recital of The Gold-Bug and 
The Pit and the Pendulum? — both of which, how- 
ever, I was soon enough to read for myself, adding 
to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Were 
we not also forever mounting on little platforms 
at our infant schools to "speak" The Raven and 
Lenore and the verses in which we phrased the 
heroine as Annabellee? — falling thus into the trap 
the poet had so recklessly laid for us, as he had 
laid one for our interminable droning, not less, in 
the other pieces I have named. So far from mis- 
prizing our ill-starred magician we acclaimed him 
surely at every turn; he lay upon our tables and 
resounded in our mouths, while we communed to 
satiety, even for boyish appetites, over the thrill 
of his choicest pages. Don't I just recognise the 
ghost of a dim memory of a children's Christmas 
party at the house of Fourteenth Street neigh- 
bours — they come back to me as "the Beans": 
who and what and whence and whither the kindly 
Beans? — where I admired over the chimney piece 
the full-length portrait of a lady seated on the 
ground in a Turkish dress, with hair flowing loose 
from a cap which was not as. the caps of ladies 
known to me, and I think with a tambourine, 
who was somehow identified to my enquiring mind 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 61 

as the wife of the painter of the piece, Mr. Osgood, 
and the so ministering friend of the unhappy Mr. 
Poe. There she throned in honour, hke Queen 
Constance on the "huge firm earth" — all for that 
and her tambourine; and surely we could none of 
us have done more for the connection. 

Washington Irving I "met," with infant prompt- 
itude, very much as I had met General Scott; only 
this time it was on a steamboat that I apprehended 
the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient 
protection I then was — during the summer after- 
noon's sail from New York to Fort Hamilton — 
having named him to me, for this long preserva- 
tion, before they greeted and talked, and having a 
fact of still more moment to mention, with the 
greatest concern, afterwards: Mr. Irving had given 
him the news of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller 
in those very waters (Fire Island at least was but 
just without our big Bay) during the great August 
storm that had within the day or two passed over 
us. The unfortunate lady was essentially of the 
Boston connection; but she must have been, and 
probably through Emerson, a friend of my parents 
— mustn't she have held "conversations," in the 
finest exotic Bostonese, in New York, Emerson 
himself lecturing there to admiration? — since the 
more I squeeze the sponge of memory the more its 
stored secretions flow, to remind me here again 
that, being with those elders late one evening at an 



62 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the National 
Academy, then confined to scant quarters, I was 
shown a small full-length portrait of Miss Fuller, 
seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long 
white shawl, the failure of which to do justice to 
its original my companions denounced with some 
emphasis. Was this work from the hand of Mr. 
Tom Hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned 
only with the life-sized, the enormous (as I took 
it to be) the full-length, the violently protruded 
accessories in which come back to me with my 
infant sense of the wonder and the beauty of them, 
as expressed above all in the image of a very long 
and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, stand- 
ing at a window before a row of plants or bulbs 
in tall coloured glasses. The light of the window 
playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its 
glass and of the flower-pots and the other furni- 
ture, passed, by my impression, for the sign of the 
master hand; and was it all brave and charming, 
or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and 
helpless? I put these questions as to a vanished 
world and by way of pressing back into it only the 
more clingingly and tenderly — wholly regardless 
in other words of whether the answers to them at 
all matter. They matter doubtless but for fond 
evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must neg- 
lect none of the arts, one must do it with all the 
forms. Why I should so like to do it is another 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 63 

matter — and what "outside interest" I may sup- 
pose myseK to create perhaps still another: I fatu- 
ously proceed at any rate, I make so far as I can 
the small warm dusky homogeneous New York 
world of the mid-century close about us. 



VI 

I SEE a small and compact and ingenuous 
society, screened in somehow conveniently 
from north and west, but open wide to the 
east and comparatively to the south and, though 
perpetually moving up Broadway, none the less 
constantly and delightfully walking down it. 
Broadway was the feature and the artery, the 
joy and the adventure of one's childhood, and it 
stretched, and prodigiously, from Union Square 
to Barnum's great American Museum by the City 
Hall — or only went further on the Saturday 
mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) 
when we were swept off by a loving aunt, our 
mother's only sister, then much domesticated with 
us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned 
itself from the first, to Wall Street and the torture 
chamber of Dr. Parkhurst, our tremendously re- 
spectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpled 
and so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark 
and glossy wig, that he had been our mother's and 
our aunt's haunting fear in their youth as well, 
since, in their quiet Warren Street, not far off, 
they were, dreadful to think, comparatively under 
his thumb. He extremely resembles, to my mind's 

64 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 65 

eye, certain figures in Phiz's illustrations to Dick- 
ens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal 
that our elders must, by some mistaken law of 
compensation, some refinement of the vindictive, 
be making us "pay" for what they in like help- 
lessness had suffered from him: as if we had done 
them any harm! Our analysis was muddled, yet 
in a manner relieving, and for us too there were 
compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, 
but which I could easily, even if shyly, have named. 
One of these was Godey's Lady's Book, a sallow 
pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the 
warmer and less stony light of the Wall Street of 
those days and through the smell of ancient ano- 
dynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguile- 
ment while we waited : I was to encounter in Phiz's 
Dombey and Son that design for our tormentor's 
type. There is no doubt whatever that I suc- 
cumbed to the spell of Godey, who, unlike the 
present essences, was an anodyne before the fact 
as well as after; since I remember poring, in his 
pages, over tales of fashionable life in Philadelphia 
while awaiting my turn in the chair, not less than 
doing so when my turn was over and to the music 
of my brother's groans. This must have been at 
the hours when we were left discreetly to our own 
fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself of 
the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's 
and then come back for us; the ladies' great shop. 



66 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and notoriously 
fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily 
trailed through it, hanging on the skirts, very lit- 
erally, of indecision) which bravely waylaid cus- 
tom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street. 
Wasn't part of the charm of life — since I assume 
that there was such a charm — in its being then (I 
allude to life itself) so much more down-towny, on 
the supposition at least that our young gravitation 
in that sense for most of the larger joys consorted 
with something of the general habit? The joy 
that had to be fished out, like Truth, from the very 
bottom of the well was attendance at Trinity 
Church, still in that age supereminent, pointedly 
absolute, the finest feature of the southward scene; 
to the privilege of which the elder Albany cousins 
were apt to be treated when they came on to stay 
with us; an indulgence making their enjoyment of 
our city as down-towny as possible too, for I seem 
otherwise to see them but as returning with the 
familiar Stewart headache from the prolonged 
strain of selection. 

The great reward dispensed to us for our ses- 
sions in the house of pain — as to which it be- 
came our subsequent theory that we had been 
regularly dragged there on alternate Saturdays 
— was our being carried on the return to the 
house of delight, or to one of them, for there 
were specifically two, where we partook of ice- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 67 

cream, deemed sovereign for sore mouths, deemed 
sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for 
everything. Two great establishments for the ser- 
vice of it graced the prospect, one Thompson's 
and the other Taylor's, the former, I perfectly 
recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart 
but dazzling, and having together the effect 
that whichever we went to we wondered if we 
hadn't better have gone to the other — with that 
capacity of childhood for making the most of 
its adventures after a fashion that may look so 
like making the least. It is in our father's com- 
pany indeed that, as I press the responsive spring, 
I see the bedizened saucers heaped up for our fond 
consumption (they bore the Taylor-title painted in 
blue and gilded, with the Christian name, as pa- 
rentally pointed out to us, perverted to "Jhon" 
for John, whereas the Thompson-name scorned 
such vulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) 
whence I infer that still other occasions for that 
experience waited on us — as almost any would 
serve, and a paternal presence so associated with 
them was not in the least conceivable in the Wall 
Street repaire. That presence is in fact not asso- 
ciated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with 
the least of our suffered shocks or penalties — 
though partly doubtless because our acquaintance 
with such was of the most limited; a conclusion I 
form even while judging it to have been on the 



68 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

whole sufficient for our virtue. This sounds per- 
haps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies or 
prigs — which was as far as possible from being 
the case; we were bred in horror of conscious pro- 
priety, of what my father was fond of calling 
"flagrant" morality; what I myself at any rate 
read back into our rare educational ease, for the 
memory of some sides of which I was ever to be 
thankful, is, besides the general humanisation of 
our apprehended world and our "social" tone, the 
unmistakeable appearance that my father was 
again and again accompanied in public by his 
small second son : so many young impressions come 
back to me as gathered at his side and in his per- 
sonal haunts. Not that he mustn't have offered 
his firstborn at least equal opportunities; but I 
make out that he seldom led us forth, such as we 
were, together, and my brother must have had in 
his turn many a mild adventure of which the 
secret — I like to put it so — perished with him. 
He was to remember, as I perceived later on, many 
things that I didn't, impressions I sometimes 
wished, as with a retracing jealousy, or at least 
envy, that I might also have fallen direct heir to; 
but he professed amazement, and even occasion- 
ally impatience, at my reach of reminiscence — 
liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps 
in favour of new rather than to hoard and so com- 
placently exhibit them. If in my way I collected 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 69 

the new as well I yet cherished the old; the ragbag 
of memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I 
learnt with time to control the habit of bringing it 
forth. And I say that with a due sense of my 
doubtless now appearing to empty it into these 
pages. 

I keep picking out at hazard those passages of 
our earliest age that help to reconstruct for me 
even by tiny touches the experience of our parents, 
any shade of which seems somehow to signify. I 
cherish, to the extent of here reproducing, an old 
daguerreotype all the circumstances of the taking 
of which I intensely recall — though as I was lately 
turned twelve when I figured for it the feat of 
memory is perhaps not remarkable. It documents 
for me in so welcome and so definite a manner 
my father's cultivation of my company. It docu- 
ments at the same time the absurdest little legend 
of my small boyhood — the romantic tradition of 
the value of being taken up from wherever we 
were staying to the queer empty dusty smelly 
New York of midsummer: I apply that last term 
because we always arrived by boat and I have 
still in my nostril the sense of the abords of the 
hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quar- 
ters, where big loose cobbles, for the least of all 
the base items, lay wrenched from their sockets 
of pungent black mud and where the dependent 
streets managed by a law of their own to be all 



70 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

corners and the corners to be all groceries ; groceries 
indeed largely of the "green" order, so far as green- 
ness could persist in the torrid air, and that 
bristled, in glorious defiance of traffic, with the 
overflow of their wares and implements. Carts 
and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or 
stacked, famiharly elbowed in its course the bump- 
ing hack (the comprehensive "carriage" of other 
days, the only vehicle of hire then known to us) 
while the situation was accepted by the loose citi- 
zen in the garb of a freeman save for the brass star 
on his breast — and the New York garb of the 
period was, as I remember it, an immense attesta- 
tion of liberty. Why the throb of romance should 
have beat time for me to such visions I can scarce 
explain, or can explain only by the fact that the 
squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and sea- 
soned, and that I should wrong the whole impres- 
sion if I didn't figure it first and foremost as that 
of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the 
stacked boxes and baskets of our youth represent 
but the boundless fruitage of that more bucolic age 
of the American world, and what was after all of 
so strong an assault as the rankness of such a har- 
vest? Where is that fruitage now, where in par- 
ticular are the peaches d'antan? where the mounds 
of Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky 
sweetness of which our childhood seems to have 
been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 71 

oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit- 
eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular, 
peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and 
peaches yellow, played a part in life from which 
they have somehow been deposed; every garden, 
almost every bush and the very boys' pockets grew 
them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream 
at every meal; domestically "brandied" they fig- 
ured, the rest of the year, scarce less freely — if 
they were rather a *' party dish" it was because 
they made the party whenever they appeared, and 
when ice-cream was added, or they were added to 
it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above 
all the public heaps of them, the high-piled re- 
ceptacles at every turn, touched the street as with 
a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected 
and scattered fragments, the memory of the slip- 
pery skins and rinds and kernels with which the 
old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself en-' 
deared to me and contributes a further pictorial 
grace. We ate everything in those days by the 
bushel and the barrel, as from stores that were 
infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as 
cocoanuts, and the amount of stomach-ache in- 
volved was negligible in the general Eden-like 
consciousness. 

The glow of this consciousness even in so small 
an organism was part of the charm of these re- 
treats offered me cityward upon our base of pro- 



72 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

visions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, 
was in my fond perception of that almost eccentri- 
cally home-loving habit in my father which fur- 
nished us with half the household humour of our 
childhood — besides furnishing him with any quan- 
tity of extravagant picture of his so prompt pangs 
of anguish in absence for celebration of his precipi- 
tate returns. It was traditional for us later on, 
and especially on the European scene, that for 
him to leave us in pursuit of some advantage or 
convenience, some improvement of our condition, 
some enlargement of our view, was for him breath- 
lessly to reappear, after the shortest possible in- 
terval, with no account at all to give of the benefit 
aimed at, but instead of this a moving representa- 
tion, a far richer recital, of his spiritual adventures 
at the horrid inhuman inns and amid the hard 
alien races which had stayed his advance. He re- 
acted, he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from 
whatever brief explorations or curiosities; these 
passionate spontaneities were the pulse of his life 
and quite some of the principal events of ours ; and, 
as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever hap- 
pened to him for inward intensity happened abun- 
dantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as well 
as for an ease and a quality of amusement among 
ourselves that was really always to fail us among 
others. Comparatively late in life, after his death, 
I had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 73 

in Europe, an American city in which he had had, 
since his own father's death, interests that were of 
importance to us all. On my asking the agent in 
charge when the owner had last taken personal 
cognisance of his property that gentleman replied 
only half to my surprise that he had never in all 
his years of possession performed such an act. 
Then it was perhaps that I most took the measure 
of his fine faith in human confidence as an admin- 
istrative function. He had to have a relation, 
somehow expressed — and as he was the vividest 
and happiest of letter-writers it rarely failed of 
coming; but once it was established it served him, 
in every case, much better than fussy challenges, 
which had always the drawback of involving lapses 
and inattentions in regard to solicitudes more 
pressing. He incurably took for granted — in- 
curably because whenever he did so the process 
succeeded; with which association, however, I per- 
haps overdrench my complacent vision of our sum- 
mer snatches at town. Through a grave accident 
in early hfe country walks on rough roads were, in 
spite of his great constitutional soundness, tedious 
and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand 
the peopled pavement, the thought of which made 
him restless when away. Hence the fideHties and 
sociabilities, however superficial, that he couldn't 
not reaffirm — if he could only reaffirm the others, 
the really intimate and still more communicable, 
soon enough afterwards. 



74 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

It was these of the improvised and casual sort 
that I shared with him thus indehbly; for truly if 
we took the boat to town to do things I did them 
quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could 
scarce have done them more. My part may indeed 
but have been to surround his part with a thick 
imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an 
activity than which I could dream of none braver 
or wilder. We went to the office of The New 
York Tribune — my father's relations with that 
journal were actual and close; and that was a 
wonderful world indeed, with strange steepnesses 
and machineries and noises and hurrying bare- 
armed, bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation 
clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly undressed gen- 
tlemen (it was always July or August) some of 
whom I knew at home, taking it all as if it were 
the most natural place in the world. It was big 
to me, big to me with the breath of great vague 
connections, and I supposed the gentlemen very 
old, though since aware that they must have been, 
for the connections, remarkably young; and the 
conversation of one of them, the one I saw oftenest 
up town, who attained to great local and to con- 
siderable national eminence afterwards, and who 
talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, I 
retain as many bright fragments of as if I had been 
another little Boswell. It was as if he had dropped 
into my mind the germ of certain interests that 
were lonsj afterwards to flower — as for instance 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 75 

on his announcing the receipt from Paris of news 
of the appearance at the Theatre Frangais of an 
actress, Madame Judith, who was formidably to 
compete with her corehgionary Rachel and to en- 
danger that artist's laurels. Why should Madame 
Judith's name have stuck to me through all the 
years, since I was never to see her and she is as 
forgotten as Rachel is remembered? Why should 
that scrap of gossip have made a date for my 
consciousness, turning it to the Comedie with an 
intensity that was long afterwards to culminate? 
Why was it equally to abide for me that the same 
gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned 
his having just come back from a wonderful city 
of the West, Chicago, which, though but a year 
or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were 
any, and holes and humps where there were none, 
and shanties where there were not big blocks, and 
everything where there had yesterday been noth- 
ing, had already developed a huge energy and 
curiosity, and also an appetite for lectures? I be- 
came aware of the Comedie, I became aware of 
Chicago; I also became aware that even the most 
alluring fiction was not always for little boys to 
read. It was mentioned at the Tribune office that 
one of its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put 
forth a novel rather oddly entitled "Hot Corn" 
and more or less having for its subject the career 
of a little girl who hawked that familiar American 



76 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

luxury in the streets. The volume, I think, was 
put into my father's hand, and I recall my prompt 
desire to make acquaintance with it no less than 
the remark, as promptly addressed to my com- 
panion, that the work, however engaging, was not 
one that should be left accessible to an innocent 
child. The pang occasioned by this warning has 
scarcely yet died out for me, nor my sense of my 
first wonder at the discrimination — so great be- 
came from that moment the mystery of the ta- 
booed book, of whatever identity; the question, in 
my breast, of why, if it was to be so right for 
others, it was only to be wrong for me. I re- 
member the soreness of the thought that it was I 
rather who was wrong for the book — which was 
somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit 
one couldn't but be involved. Neither then nor 
afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn" revealed 
to me, and the sense of privation was to be more 
prolonged, I fear, than the vogue of the tale, which 
even as a success of scandal couldn't have been 
great. 



VII 

DIMLY queer and "pathetic" to me were to 
remain through much of the after time 
indeed most of those early indigenous 
vogues and Hterary flurries: so few of those that 
brushed by my childhood had been other than a 
tinkling that suddenly stopped. I am afraid I 
mean that what was touching was rather the fact 
that the tinkle could penetrate than the fact that 
it died away ; the light of criticism might have beat 
so straight — if the sense of proportion and the 
fact of compassion hadn't waved it away — on 
the aesthetic phase during which the appeal was 
mainly by the tinkle. The Scarlet Letter and 
The Seven Gables had the deep tone as much as 
one would; but of the current efforts of the imag- 
ination they were alone in having it till Walt 
Whitman broke out in the later fifties — and I 
was to know nothing of that happy genius till long 
after. An absorbed perusal of The Lamplighter 
was what I was to achieve at the fleeting hour I 
continue to circle round; that romance was on 
every one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less 
thrust upon me in amends for the imposed sacri- 
fice of a ranker actuality — that of the improper 

77 



78 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives 
in me the main question of where his impropriety, 
in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could 
possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that 
Walt Whitman achieved an impropriety of the first 
magnitude; that success, however, but showed us 
the platitude returning in a genial rage upon it- 
self and getting out of control by generic excess. 
There was no rage at any rate in The Lamplighter, 
over which I fondly hung and which would have 
been my first "grown-up" novel — it had been 
soothingly offered me for that — had I consented 
to take it as really and truly grown-up. I couldn't 
have said what it lacked for the character, I only 
had my secret reserves, and when one blest after- 
noon on the New Brighton boat I waded into 
The Initials I saw how right I had been. The 
Initials was grown-up and the difference thereby 
exquisite; it came over me with the very first page, 
assimilated in the fluttered Httle cabin to which I 
had retired with it — all in spite of the fact too 
that my attention was distracted by a pair of re- 
markable little girls who lurked there out of more 
public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen 
for nothing. 

That must have been a rich hour, for I mix the 
marvel of the Boon Children, strange pale little 
flowers of the American theatre, with my conscious 
joy in bringing back to my mother, from our 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 79 

forage in New York, a gift of such happy promise 
as the history of the long-legged Mr. Hamilton 
and his two Bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, 
Hildegarde, was to figure for our small generation 
as the very type of the haughty as distinguished 
from the forward heroine (since I think our cate- 
gories really came to no more than those). I 
couldn't have got very far with Hildegarde in mo- 
ments so scant, but I memorably felt that romance 
was thick round me — everything, at such a crisis, 
seeming to make for it at once. The Boon Chil- 
dren, conveyed thus to New Brighton under care 
of a lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute 
triumphed over the note of the battered, though 
the showy in it rather succumbed at the same 
time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant 
phenomena, for a performance that night at the 
Pavilion, where our attendance, it was a shock to 
feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without 
charge at the pair of weary and sleepy little 
mountebanks I found the histrionic character and 
the dramatic profession for the first time revealed 
to me. They filled me with fascination and yet 
with fear; they expressed a melancholy grace and 
a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully 
detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even 
to being pinched and slapped, for art's sake, at 
home; they honoured me with no notice whatever 
and regarded me doubtless as no better than one 



80 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

of the little louts peeping through the tent of the 
show. In return I judged their appearance dissi- 
pated though fascinating, and sought consolation 
for the memory of their scorn and the loss of their 
exhibition, as time went on, in noting that the 
bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have 
been stayed. I neither "met" them nor heard of 
them again. The little Batemans must have ob- 
scured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing 
at the same period and with a larger command of 
the pictorial poster and the other primitive sym- 
bols in Broadway — such posters and such sym- 
bols as they were at that time! — the little Bate- 
mans who were to be reserved, in maturer form, 
for my much later and more grateful appreciation. 
This weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, 
something more to the purpose, the retained im- 
pression of those choicest of our loiterings that 
took place, still far down-town, at the Bookstore, 
home of delights and haunt of fancy. It was at 
the Bookstore we had called on the day of The 
Initials and the Boon Children — and it was 
thence we were returning with our spoil, of which 
the charming novel must have been but a frag- 
ment. My impression composed itself of many 
pieces; a great and various practice of burying my 
nose in the half-open book for the strong smell of 
paper and printer's ink, known to us as the Eng- 
lish smell, was needed to account for it. That 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 81 

was the exercise of the finest sense that hung about 
us, my brother and me — or of one at least but 
httle less fine than the sense for the satisfaction 
of which we resorted to Thompson's and to Tay- 
lor's: it bore me company during all our returns 
from forages and left me persuaded that I had 
only to snuff up hard enough, fresh uncut volume 
in hand, to taste of the very substance of London. 
All our books in that age were Enghsh, at least all 
our down-town ones — I personally recall scarce 
any that were not; and I take the perception of 
that quality in them to have associated itself with 
more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than 
any other one principle of growth. It was all a 
result of the deeply infected state : I had been pre- 
maturely poisoned — as I shall presently explain. 
The Bookstore, fondest of my father's resorts, 
though I remember no more of its public identity 
than that it further enriched the brave depth of 
Broadway, was overwhelmingly and irresistibly 
English, as not less tonically English was our prin- 
cipal host there, with whom we had moreover, my 
father and I, thanks to his office, such personal 
and genial relations that I recall seeing him grace 
our board at home, in company with his wife, 
whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure 
and flounces I found none the less informing, none 
the less "racial," for my not being then versed 
in the language of analysis. 



82 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

The true inwardness of these rich meanings — 
those above all of the Bookstore itself — was that 
a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus cre- 
ated, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression 
is clumsy for so mystic a process. What else can 
have happened but that, having taken over, under 
suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, 
a particular throbbing consciousness, I had become 
aware of the source at which it could best be re- 
freshed? That consciousness, so communicated, 
was just simply of certain impressions, certain 
sources of impression again, proceeding from over 
the sea and situated beyond it — or even much 
rather of my parents' own impression of such, the 
fruit of a happy time spent in and about London 
with their two babies and reflected in that portion 
of their talk with each other to which I best at- 
tended. Had all their talk for its subject, in my 
infant ears, that happy time? — did it deal only 
with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park, 
where, over against their dwelling, their two babies 
mainly took the air under charge of Fanny of 
Albany, their American nurse, whose remark as to 
the degree to which the British Museum fell short 
for one who had had the privilege of that of Albany 
was handed down to us? Did it never forbear 
from Windsor and Richmond and Sudbrook and 
Ham Common, amid the rich complexity of which, 
crowding their discourse with echoes, they had 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 83 

spent their summer? — all a scattering of such 
pearls as it seemed that their second-born could 
most deftly and instinctively pick up. Our sole 
maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted 
and cherished presence during those and many 
later years, was in a position to share with them the 
treasure of these mild memories, which strike me 
as having for the most part, through some bright 
household habit, overflowed at the breakfast-table, 
where I regularly attended with W. J.; she had 
imbibed betimes in Europe the seeds of a long 
nostalgia, and I think of her as ever so patiently 
communicative on that score under pressure of 
my artless appeal. That I should have been so 
inquiring while still so destitute of primary data 
was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was for 
that matter quite as if my infant divination pro- 
ceeded by the light of nature: I divined that it 
would matter to me in the future that "English 
life" should be of this or that fashion. My father 
had subscribed for me to a small periodical of 
quarto form, covered in yellow and entitled The 
Charm, which shed on the question the softest 
lustre, but of which the appearances were sadly 
intermittent, or then struck me as being; inasmuch 
as many of our visits to the Bookstore were to ask 
for the new number — only to learn with painful 
frequency that the last consignment from London 
had arrived without it. I feel again the pang of 



84. A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

that disappointment — as if through the want of 
what I needed most for going on; the Enghsh smell 
was exhaled by The Charm in a peculiar degree, 
and I see myself affected by the failure as by that 
of a vital tonic. It was not, at the same time, by 
a Charm the more or the less that my salvation 
was to be, as it were, worked out, or my imag- 
ination at any rate duly convinced; conviction 
was the result of the very air of home, so far as I 
most consciously inhaled it. This represented, no 
doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand 
all the interest they were capable of yielding; but 
I had taken the twist, had sipped the poison, as I 
say, and was to feel it to that end the most salu- 
tary cup. I saw my parents homesick, as I con- 
ceived, for the ancient order and distressed and 
inconvenienced by many of the more immediate 
features of the modern, as the modern pressed 
upon us, and since their theory of our better living 
was from an early time that we should renew the 
quest of the ancient on the very first possibility I 
simply grew greater in the faith that somehow to 
manage that would constitute success in life. I 
never found myself deterred from this fond view, 
which was implied in every question I asked, 
every answer I got, and every plan I formed. 

Those are great words for the daydream of infant 
ignorance, yet if success in life may perhaps be 
best defined as the performance in age of some 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 85 

intention arrested in youth I may frankly put in a 
claim to it. To press my nose against the sources 
of the English smell, so different for young bib- 
liophiles from any American, was to adopt that 
sweetness as the sign of my "atmosphere"; round- 
about might be the course to take, but one was in 
motion from the first and one never lost sight of the 
goal. The very names of places and things in the 
other world — the marked opposite in most ways 
of that in which New York and Albany, Fort 
Hamilton and New Brighton formed so fallacious 
a maximum — became to me values and secrets 
and shibboleths; they were probably often on my 
tongue and employed as ignorance determined, but 
I quite recall being ashamed to use them as much 
as I should have liked. It was New Brighton, I 
reconstruct (and indeed definitely remember) that 
"finished" us at last — that and our final sordid 
school, W. J.'s and mine, in New York: the ancient 
order had somehow to be invoked when such "ad- 
vantages" as those were the best within our com- 
pass and our means. Not further to anticipate, 
at all events, that climax was for a while but 
vaguely in sight, and the illusion of felicity con- 
tinued from season to season to shut us in. It is 
only of what I took for felicity, however few the 
years and however scant the scene, that I am pre- 
tending now to speak; though I shall have strained 
the last drop of romance from this vision of our 



86 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

towny summers with the quite sharp reminiscence 
of my first sitting for my daguerreotype. I re- 
paired with my father on an August day to the 
great Broadway estabhshment of Mr. Brady, su- 
preme in that then beautiful art, and it is my 
impression — the only point vague with me — 
that though we had come up by the Staten Island 
boat for the purpose we were to keep the affair 
secret till the charming consequence should break, 
at home, upon my mother. Strong is my convic- 
tion that our mystery, in the event, yielded almost 
at once to our elation, for no tradition had a 
brighter household life with us than that of our 
father's headlong impatience. He moved in a 
cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipi- 
tation and divulgation, a chartered rebel against 
cold reserves. The good news in his hand refused 
under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense of 
communicable pleasure in his breast was posi- 
tively explosive; so that we saw those "surprises" 
in which he had conspired with our mother for our 
benefit converted by him in every case, under our 
shamelessly encouraged guesses, into common con- 
spiracies against her — against her knowing, that 
is, how thoroughly we were all compromised. He 
had a special and deHghtful sophistry at the ser- 
vice of his overflow, and never so fine a fancy as 
in defending it on "human" grounds. He was 
something very different withal from a parent of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 87 

weak mercies; weakness was never so positive and 
plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you 
be more handsomely or on occasion even more 
comically aggressive. 

My small point is simply, however, that the 
secresy of our conjoined portrait was probably 
very soon, by his act, to begin a public and shining 
life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; 
as to which moreover still another remembrance 
steals on me, a proof of the fact that our adventure 
was improvised. Sharp again is my sense of not 
being so adequately dressed as I should have taken 
thought for had I foreseen my exposure; though 
the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted 
could surely have left me but few alternatives. 
The main resource of a small New York boy in 
this line at that time was the little sheath-like 
jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and 
adorned in front with a single row of brass buttons 
— a garment of scant grace assuredly and com- 
promised to my consciousness, above all, by a 
strange ironic light from an unforgotten source. 
It was but a short time before those days that 
the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to 
lecture on The English Humourists, and still pres- 
ent to me is the voice proceeding from my father's 
library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at 
an opening of the door, in passage or on staircase, 
prompted him to the formidable words: *'Come 



88 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary 
jacket!" My sense of my jacket became from 
that hour a heavy one — further enriched as my 
vision is by my shyness of posture before the 
seated, the celebrated visitor, who struck me, in 
the sunny light of the animated room, as enor- 
mously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder 
the hand of benevolence, bent on my native cos- 
tume the spectacles of wonder. I was to know 
later on why he had been so amused and why, 
after asking me if this were the common uniform 
of my age and class, he remarked that in England, 
were I to go there, I should be addressed as ''But- 
tons." It had been revealed to me thus in a flash 
that we were somehow queer, and though never 
exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at 
least felt so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's 
vise. Beautiful most decidedly the lost art of the 
daguerreotype; I remember the "exposure" as on 
this occasion interminably long, yet with the result 
of a facial anguish far less harshly reproduced than 
my suffered snapshots of a later age. Too few, I 
may here interject, were to remain my gathered 
impressions of the great humourist, but one of 
them, indeed almost the only other, bears again on 
the play of his humour over our perversities of 
dress. It belongs to a later moment, an occasion 
on which I see him familiarly seated with us, in 
Paris, during the spring of 1857, at some repast at 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 89 

which the younger of us too, by that time, habitu- 
ally flocked, in our affluence of five. Our young- 
est was beside him, a small sister, then not quite 
in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after 
the fashion of the period and place; and the tradi- 
tion lingered long of his having suddenly laid his 
hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed 
with ludicrous horror: "Crinoline? — I was sus- 
pecting it! So young and so depraved!" 

A fainter image, that of one of the New York 
moments, just eludes me, pursue it as I will; I 
recover but the setting and the fact of his brief 
presence in it, with nothing that was said or done 
beyond my being left with my father to watch 
our distinguished friend's secretary, who was also 
a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to 
paint. The setting, as I recall it, was an odd, 
oblong, blank "private parlour" at the Clarendon 
Hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose 
ancient corner of Fourth Avenue and — was it 
Eighteenth Street? — long ago ceased to know it; 
the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was Mr. Eyre 
Crowe and the obliging sitter my father, who sat 
in response to Mr. Thackeray's desire that his 
protege should find employment. The protector 
after a little departed, blessing the business, which 
took the form of a small full-length of the model 
seated, his arm extended and the hand on the knob 
of his cane. The work, it may at this time of day 



90 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

be mentioned, fell below its general possibilities; 
but I note the scene through which I must duly 
have gaped and wondered (for I had as yet seen 
no one, least of all a casual acquaintance in an 
hotel parlour, "really paint" before,) as a happy 
example again of my parent's positive cultivation 
of my society, it would seem, and thought for my 
social education. And then there are other con- 
nections; I recall it as a Sunday morning, I recover 
the place itseK as a featureless void — bleak and 
bare, with its developments all to come, the hotel 
parlour of other New York days — but vivid still 
to me is my conscious assistance for the first time 
at operations that were to mean much for many 
of my coming years. Those of quiet Mr. Crowe 
held me spellbound — I was to circle so wistfully, 
as from that beginning, round the practice of his 
art, which in spite of these earnest approaches and 
intentions never on its own part in the least ac- 
knowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more 
than it was ever to respond, for that matter, to 
the overtures of the mild aspirant himself, known 
to my observation long afterwards, in the London 
years, as the most touchingly resigned of the chil- 
dren of disappointment. Not only by associa- 
tion was he a Thackerayan figure, but much as if 
the master's hand had stamped him with the out- 
line and the value, with life and sweetness and 
patience — shown, as after the long futility, seated 



I 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 91 

in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. That 
was sad, one couldn't but feel; yet it was in the 
oddest way impossible to take him for a failure. 
He might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but 
what was that when he was one of Thackeray's 
own successes? — in the minor line, but with such 
a grace and such a truth, those of some dim 
second cousin to Colonel Newcome. 



VIII 

I FEEL that at such a rate I remember too much, 
and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of 
it. To look back at all is to meet the appari- 
tional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare 
of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, 
whether of person or place, it fixes me back and 
seems the less lost — not to my consciousness, for 
that is nothing, but to its own — by my stopping 
however idly for it. The day of the daguerreo- 
type, the August afternoon, what was it if not one 
of the days when we went to Union Square for 
luncheon and for more ice-cream and more peaches 
and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease 
accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may 
have been indeed that a visit to Mrs. Cannon 
rather on that occasion engaged us — memory 
selects a little confusedly from such a wealth of 
experience. For the wonder was the experience, 
and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much 
find it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling 
short. Mrs. Cannon lurked near Fourth Street — 
that I abundantly grasp, not more definitely placing 
her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of 

grave bye-streets westwardly "back of" Broad- 

92 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 93 

way, yet at no great distance from it, where she 
must have occupied a house at a corner, since we 
reached her not by steps that went up to a front 
door but by others that went sHghtly down and 
formed clearly an independent side access, a fea- 
ture that affected me as rich and strange. What 
the steps went down to was a spacious room, light 
and friendly, so that it couldn't have been com- 
promised by an "area," which offered the brave 
mystification, amid other mystifications, of being 
at once a parlour and a shop, a shop in particular 
for the relief of gentlemen in want of pockethand- 
kerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw- 
covered bottles of the essence known in old New 
York as "Cullone" — with a very long and big O. 
Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate 
white or other needlework, as if she herself made 
the collars and the neckties and hemmed the 
pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this con- 
flicts with the sense of importation from remoter 
centres of fashion breathed by some of the more 
thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the 
same time that it quickened the oddity of the 
place. For the oddity was in many things — 
above all perhaps in there being no counter, no 
rows of shelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's 
commerce; the parlour clearly dissimulated the 
shop — and positively to that extent that I might 
uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimu- 



94 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

lated. It represented, honestly, I made out in the 
course of visits that seem to me to have been 
deHghtfuUy repeated, the more informal of the 
approaches to our friend's brave background or 
hinterland, the realm of her main industry, the 
array of the furnished apartments for gentlemen — 
gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau 
de Cologne and the neckties and who struck me 
as principally consisting of the ever remarkable 
Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns 
from Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of com- 
fort that the New York Hotel couldn't yield. Fas- 
cinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's 
establishment, where the talk took the turn, in 
particular, of Mr. John and Mr. Edward and Mr. 
Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, 
who were on the spot in other rocking chairs and 
with other poised needles, made their points as 
well as the rest of us. The interest of the place 
was that the uncles were somehow always under 
discussion — as to where they at the moment 
might be, or as to when they were expected, or 
above all as to how (the "how" was the great 
matter and the fine emphasis) they had last ap- 
peared and might be conceived as carrying them- 
selves; and that their consumption of neckties and 
Eau de Cologne was somehow inordinate: I might 
have been judging it in my innocence as their only 
consommation. I refer to those sources, I say, the 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 95 

charm of the scene, the finer part of which must 
yet have been that it didn't, as it regularly lapsed, 
dispose of all mystifications. If I didn't under- 
stand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon 
understood (that was what she did most of all, 
even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and col- 
lars) and my father understood, and each under- 
stood that the other did. Miss Maggie and Miss 
Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who 
didn't understand — save in so far as I under- 
stood that, which was a kind of pale joy; and 
meanwhile there would be more to come from 
uncles so attachingly, so almost portentously, dis- 
cussable. The vision at any rate was to stick by 
me as through its old-world friendly grace, its light 
on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the 
tender personal note in the good lady's importa- 
tions and anxieties, that of the hand-made fabric 
and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as a 
value anywhere — by which I meant in the right 
corner of any social picture, I afterwards said to 
myself — that refined and composed significance 
of Mrs. Cannon's scene. 

Union Square was a different matter, though 
with the element there also that I made out that 
I didn't make out (my sense of drama was in this 
case, I think, rather more frightened off than led 
on;) a drawback for which, however, I consoled 
myself by baked apples and custards, an inveterate 



96 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of 
weekdays being various and casual) and by a 
study of a great store, as it seemed to me, of steel- 
plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of 
Romance, with one in particular, presenting those 
of Shakespeare, in which the plates were so art- 
fully coloured and varnished, and complexion and 
dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was 
for long afterwards a shock to me at the theatre 
not to see just those bright images, with their 
peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the 
other day, moreover, to renew almost on the very 
spot the continuity of contemplation; large lump- 
ish presences, precarious creations of a day, seemed 
to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or 
two of the minor monuments, pleasant appreciable 
things, of the other time; yet close to Univer- 
sity Place the old house of the picture-books and 
the custards and the domestic situation had, 
though disfigured and overscored, not quite re- 
ceived its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere 
identification of obscured window and profaned 
portico, a whole chapter of history; which fact 
should indeed be a warning to penetration, a prac- 
tical plea here for the superficial — by its exhibi- 
tion of the rate at which the relations of any gage 
of experience multiply and ramify from the mo- 
ment the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a 
swarm of such relations, on the occasion I speak 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 97 

of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over 
to Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth 
with difficulty, but finding them at half a dozen 
points quite confess to a queer stale sameness. 
The gage of experience, as I say, had in these 
cases been strangely spared — the sameness had 
in two or three of them held out as with conscious 
craft. But these are impressions I shall presently 
find it impossible not to take up again at any cost. 
I first *' realised" Fourteenth Street at a very 
tender age, and I perfectly recall that flush of 
initiation, consisting as it did of an afternoon call 
with my father at a house there situated, one of an 
already fairly mature row on the south side and 
quite near Sixth Avenue. It was as *'our" house, 
just acquired by us, that he thus invited my ap- 
proval of it — heaping as that does once more the 
measure of my small adhesiveness. I thoroughly 
approved — quite as if I had foreseen that the 
place was to become to me for ever so long after- 
wards a sort of anchorage of the spirit, being at 
the hour as well a fascination for the eyes, since it 
was there I first fondly gaped at the process of 
"decorating." I saw charming men in little caps 
ingeniously formed of folded newspaper — where 
in the roaring city are those quaint badges of 
the handicrafts now? — mounted on platforms and 
casting plaster into moulds; I saw them in par- 
ticular paste long strips of yellowish grained paper 



98 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the 
grain and the pattern (for there was a pattern 
from waist-high down, a complication of dragons 
and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) 
a wonderful and sumptuous thing. I would give 
much, I protest, to recover its lost secret, to see 
what it really was — so interesting ever to re- 
trace, and sometimes so difficult of belief, in a 
community of one's own knowing, is the general 
aesthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, 
the all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, 
that Taste has smilingly survived and after which 
the fickle creature may still quite brazenly look 
one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled 
in those years with the very worst of the danger- 
signals — though indeed they figured but as coarse 
complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just 
been ushered in, and that material, in deplorable, 
in monstrous form, over all the vacant spaces and 
eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth 
and Sixth Avenues, more and more affronted the 
day. We seemed to have come up from a world of 
quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square 
and thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so in- 
stinctively unpretentious. There were even there 
spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the charm- 
less void reaching westward from the two houses 
that formed the Fifth Avenue corner to our grand- 
father's, our New York grandfather's house, itself 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 99 

built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so 
long before, and at no distant time in truth to 
be solidly but much less pleasingly neighboured. 
The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hung 
about the central space, and the ancient wooden 
palings, then so generally accounted proper for 
central spaces — the whole image infinitely recedes 
— affected even my innocent childhood as rustic 
and mean. Union Square, at the top of the 
Avenue — or what practically then counted for 
the top — was encased, more smartly, in iron rails 
and further adorned with a fountain and an aged 
amateur-looking constable, awful to my genera- 
tion in virtue of his star and his switch. I asso- 
ciate less elegance with the Parade-ground, into 
which we turned for recreation from my neigh- 
bouring dame's-school and where the parades de- 
ployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; 
though indeed the switch of office abounded there, 
for what I best recover in the connection is a sense 
and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground 
so muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long 
defunct ailanthus-tree that most of our own 
motions were a kicking of them up — the semi- 
sweet rankness of the plant was all in the air — 
and small boys pranced about as cavaliers whack- 
ing their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolder 
still, to whom this vegetation, or something kin- 
dred that escapes me, yielded long black beanlike 



100 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

slips which they Mghted and smoked, the smaller 
ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think 
of the small one I can best speak for as constantly 
wading through an Indian summer of these dis- 
jecta, fascinated by the leaf -kicking process, the 
joy of lonely trudges, over a course in which those 
parts and the slightly more northward pleasantly 
confound themselves. These were the homely joys 
of the nobler neighbourhood, elements that had 
their match, and more, hard by the Fourteenth 
Street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry, 
and the "Irish houses," two or three in number, 
exclusive of a very fine Dutch one, seated then, 
this last, almost as among gardens and groves — 
a breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, 
in that marginal ease, that spread of occupation, 
to the nearly complete absence of which New York 
aspects owe their general failure of "style." 

But there were finer vibrations as well — for 
the safely -prowling infant, though none perhaps so 
fine as when he stood long and drank deep at those 
founts of romance that gushed from the huge 
placards of the theatre. These announcements, 
at a day when advertisement was contentedly but 
information, had very much the form of magnified 
playbills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, 
yellow or white, pasted upon tall wooden screens 
or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the pos- 
sible playgoer with every circumstance that might 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 101 

seriously interest him. These screens rested so- 
ciably against trees and lamp-posts as well as 
against walls and fences, to all of which they were, 
I suppose, familiarly attached; but the sweetest 
note of their confidence was that, in parallel lines 
and the good old way, characters facing per- 
formers, they gave the whole cast, which in the 
"palmy days" of the drama often involved many 
names. I catch myself again in the fact of end- 
less stations in Fifth Avenue near the southwest 
corner of Ninth Street, as I think it must have 
been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then 
for the young badaud and the poster there was 
constantly and bravely renewed. It engaged my 
attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a 
great master in a great gallery holds that of the 
pious tourist, and even though I can't at this day 
be sure of its special reference I was with pre- 
cocious passion "at home" among the theatres — 
thanks to our parents' fond interest in them (as 
from this distance I see it flourish for the time) 
and to the liberal law and happy view under which 
the addiction was shared with us, they never 
caring much for things we couldn't care for and 
generally holding that what was good to them 
would be also good for their children. It had the 
effect certainly of preparing for these, so far as we 
should incline to cherish it, a strange little fund of 
theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard of memories 



102 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime 
and causing me to wonder to-day, before its 
abundance, on how many evenings of the month, 
or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from 
the pursuits of home. 



IX 

THE truth is doubtless, however, much less 
in the wealth of my experience than in the 
tenacity of my impression, the fact that I 
have lost nothing of what I saw and that though 
I can't now quite divide the total into separate 
occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for 
me. I shall return to some of them, wishing at 
present only to make my point of when and how 
the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly 
sprouted and flowered. I was greatly to love the 
drama, at its best, as a "form"; whatever varia- 
tions of faith or curiosity I was to know in respect 
to the infirm and inadequate theatre. There was 
of course anciently no question for us of the drama 
at its best; and indeed while I lately by chance 
looked over a copious collection of theatrical por- 
traits, beginning with the earliest age of lithog- 
raphy and photography as so applied, and docu- 
mentary in the highest degree on the personalities, 
as we nowadays say, of the old American stage, 
stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism 
triumphed, so vulgar, so barbarous, seemed the 
array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the 

note of every figure, so less than scant the claim 

103 



104 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

of such physiognomies and such reputations. 
Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit, the histrionic 
image with the artificial lights turned off — the 
fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere 
seH and resembling some closed and darkened inn 
with the sign still swung but the place blighted for 
want of custom. That consideration weighs; but 
what a "gang," all the same, when thus left to 
their own devices, the performers, men and women 
alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I 
ought perhaps to bear on them lightly in view of 
what in especial comes back to me; the sense of 
the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the 
green curtain, the particular one that was to rise 
to The Comedy of Errors on the occasion that 
must have been, for what I recall of its almost un- 
bearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting 
at a play. I should have been indebted for the 
momentous evening in that case to Mr. William 
Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, 
to the rear of Stewart's big shop and hard by the 
Park, as the Park was at that time understood, 
offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not 
complain of my having owed the adventure to a 
still greater William as well, nor think again with- 
out the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, 
of the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, 
half so dark a defiance and half so rich a promise. 
One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet one knew 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 105 

it would rise at the named hour, the only question 
being if one could exist till then. The play had 
been read to us during the day; a celebrated Eng- 
lish actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had 
arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the 
Dromios; and the agreeable Mrs. Holman, who 
had to my relentless vision too retreating a chin, 
was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded 
Mrs. Holman as a friend, though in no warmer 
light than that in which I regarded Miss Mary 
Taylor — save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the 
pull, on one's affections, of "coming out" to sing 
in white satin and quite irrelevantly between the 
acts; an advantage she shared with the younger 
and fairer and more dashing, the dancing. Miss 
Malvina, who footed it and tambourined it and 
shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. When not 
admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired 
him as Paul Pry, as Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab 
Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must have 
admired him very much — his huge fat person, 
his huge fat face and his vast slightly pendulous 
cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine wink, 
to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being 
still perfectly present to me. 

We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. 
Blake a much finer comedian, much more of a 
gentleman and a scholar — "mellow" Mr. Blake, 
whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake 



106 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

{how they must have made their points !) I connect 
partly with the Burton scene and partly with that, 
of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flour- 
ishing awhile slightly further up Broadway under 
the charmlessly commercial name of Brougham's 
Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Mu- 
seums and Lecture Rooms and Academies of 
Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon 
a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's 
Theatre. I fail doubtless to keep all my associa- 
tions clear, but what is important, or what I desire 
at least to make pass for such, is that when we 
most admired Mr. Blake we also again admired 
Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at Brougham's, 
not at Burton's, that we rendered her that tribute 
— reserved for her performance of the fond the- 
atrical daughter in the English version of Le Pere 
de la Debutante, where I see the charming panting 
dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically 
relieved by a gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush 
back from the supposed stage to the represented 
green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and 
throw herself upon the neck of the broken-down 
old gentleman in a blue coat with brass buttons 
who must have been after all, on second thoughts, 
Mr. Placide. Greater flights or more delicate 
shades the art of pathetic comedy was at that 
time held not to achieve; only I straighten it out 
that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 107 

Taylor (who preponderantly haunts my vision, 
even to the disadvantage of Miss Kate Horn in 
Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is dis- 
placed by the brilliant Laura Keene) did migrate 
to Brougham's, where we found them all them- 
selves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other 
like matters. We rallied especially to Blake as 
Dogberry, on the occasion of my second Shake- 
spearean night, for as such I seem to place it, when 
Laura Keene and Mr. Lester — the Lester Wallack 
that was to be — did Beatrice and Benedick. I 
yield to this further proof that we had our pro- 
portion of Shakespeare, though perhaps antedating 
that rapt vision of Much Ado, which may have been 
preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream at the Broadway (there 
was a confessed Theatre;) this latter now present 
to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, 
we must have felt, our greatest conceivable adven- 
ture — I cannot otherwise account for its emerging 
so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday, the 
identity of the actors, the details of their dress, 
the charm imparted by the sisters Gougenheim, 
the elegant elder as the infatuated Helena and 
the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous 
Puck. Hermia was Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon- 
coloured peplum over a white petticoat, the whole 
bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and 
forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena, 



108 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

while Mr. Nagle, not devoid, I seem to remember, 
of a blue chin and the latency of a fine brogue, 
was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge 
(also, I surmise, with a brogue) was Bottom the 
weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon — Madame 
Ponisi whose range must have been wide, since I 
see her also as the white-veiled heroine of The 
Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring death 
to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less per- 
pendicular waterfall on a fiery black steed and 
with an effect only a little blighted by the chance 
flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg of a 
trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though 
presumably at a somewhat later time or, in strict- 
ness, after childhood's fond hour, as this and that 
noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at 
any rate as representing all characters alike with 
a broad brown face framed in bands or crowns or 
other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row 
of very small tight black curls. The Cataract 
of the Ganges is all there as well, a tragedy of 
temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real 
water, with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again 
for comic relief — though all in a coarser radiance, 
thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and 
moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, 
so seen, of the play within the play; and I rank it 
in that relation with Green Bushes, despite the 
celebrity in the latter of Madame Celeste, who 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 109 

came to us straight out of London and whose ad- 
mired walk up the stage as Miami the huntress, 
a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride 
enhanced by a short kilt, black velvet leggings 
and a gun haughtily borne on the shoulder, is 
vividly before me as I write. The piece in ques- 
tion was, I recall, from the pen of Mr. Bourci- 
cault, as he then wrote his name — he was so early 
in the field and must have been from long before, 
inasmuch as he now appears to me to have sup- 
plied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceum aforesaid, 
with his choicest productions. 

I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wal- 
lack — "Fanny" Wallack, I think, not that I 
quite know who she was — as Lady Gay Spanker, 
flushed and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with 
a tail yards long and afterwards in yellow satin 
with scarce a tail at all; I am present also at Love 
in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with 
primitive art I fear, a supposedly intricate garden- 
labyrinth, and in which I admired for the first 
time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the 
public as Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she 
wanted, especially for the low-necked ordeal, less 
osseous a structure. There are pieces of that 
general association, I admit, the clue to which 
slips from me; the drama of modern life and of 
French origin — though what was then not of 
French origin? — in which Miss Julia Bennett, 



110 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

fresh from triumphs at the Haymarket, made her 
first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet, 
either as a briUiant adventuress or as the innocent 
victim of licentious design, I forget which, though 
with a sense somehow that the white bonnet, 
when of true elegance, was the note at that period 
of the adventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom 
at a later age one was to renew acquaintance as 
the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner 
and presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, 
Desdemona and Julie de Mortemer. I figure her 
as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss 
Laura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence 
of this original charmer of our parents, the flutter 
of whose prime advent is perfectly present to me, 
with the relish expressed for that *' English" sweet- 
ness of her speech (I already wondered why it 
shouldn't be English) which was not as the speech 
mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my 
hearing, even imitated, for commendation, some 
of her choicer sounds, to which I strained my ear 
on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in 
the refined comedietta of A Morning Call, where 
she made delightful game of Mr. Lester as Sir 
Edward Ardent, even to the point of causing him 
to crawl about on all fours and covered with her 
shawl after the fashion of a horse-blanket. That 
delightful impression was then unconscious of the 
blight to come — that of my apprehending, years 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 111 

after, that the brilliant comedietta was the tribute 
of our Anglo-Saxon taste to Alfred de Musset's 
elegant proverb of the Porte Ouverte ou Fermee, 
in which nothing could find itself less at home 
than the horseplay of the English version. Miss 
Laura Keene, with a native grace at the start, a 
fresh and delicate inspiration, I infer from the 
kind of pleasure she appears to have begun with 
giving, was to live to belie her promise and, be- 
coming hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) 
all claim to the higher distinction; a fact not sur- 
prising under the lurid light projected by such a 
sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an ac- 
cepted and condoned perversion to vulgarity of 
Musset's perfect little work. How could quality 
of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality 
in the material offered it? where could such lapses 
lead but to dust and desolation and what happy 
instinct not be smothered in an air so dismally 
non-conducting? Is it a foolish fallacy that these 
matters may have been on occasion, at that time, 
worth speaking of? is it only presumable that 
everything was perfectly cheap and common and 
everyone perfectly bad and barbarous and that 
even the least corruptible of our typical spectators 
were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? 
The beauty of the main truth as to any remem- 
bered matter looked at in due detachment, or in 
other words through the haze of time, is that com- 



112 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

prehension has then become one with criticism, 
compassion, as it may really be called, one with 
musing vision, and the whole company of the an- 
ciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, 
their sincerities and fallacies and vanities and tri- 
umphs, embalmed for us in the mild essence of 
their collective submission to fate. We needn't 
be strenuous about them unless we particularly 
want to, and are glad to remember in season all 
that this would imply of the strenuous about our 
own origines, our muddled initiations. If nothing 
is more certain for us than that many persons, 
within our recollection, couldn't help being rather 
generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing 
is more in the note of peace than that such a per- 
ceived state, pushed to a point, makes our scales 
of judgment but ridiculously rattle. Our admo- 
nition, our superior awareness, is of many things — 
and, among these, of how infinitely, at the worst, 
they lived, the pale superseded, and how much it 
was by their virtue. 

Which reflections, in the train of such memories 
as those just gathered, may perhaps seem over- 
strained — though they really to my own eyes 
cause the images to multiply. Still others of these 
break in upon me and refuse to be slighted; recon- 
stituting as I practically am the history of my 
fostered imagination, for whatever it may be 
worth, I won't pretend to a disrespect for any con- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 113 

tributive particle. I left myself just above staring 
at the Fifth Avenue poster, and I can't but linger 
there while the vision it evokes insists on swarm- 
ing. It was the age of the arrangements of 
Dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on 
every scene and which must have been the rough- 
est theatrical tinkers' work, but at two or three 
of which we certainly assisted. I associate them 
with Mr. Brougham's temple of the art, yet am at 
the same time beset with the Captain Cuttle of 
Dombey and Son in the form of the big Burton, 
who never, I earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, 
so that I wander a trifle confusedly. Isn't it he 
whom I remember as a monstrous Micawber, the 
coarse parody of a charming creation, with the 
entire baldness of a huge Easter egg and collar- 
points like the sails of Mediterranean feluccas? 
Dire of course for all temperance in these connec- 
tions was the need to conform to the illustrations 
of Phiz, himself already an improvising parodist 
and happy only so long as not imitated, not liter- 
ally reproduced. Strange enough the "aesthetic" 
of artists who could desire but literally to repro- 
duce. I give the whole question up, however, I 
stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of 
having, in the first place, but languished at home 
when my betters admired Miss Cushman — terri- 
bly out of the picture and the frame we should 
to-day pronounce her, I fear — as the Nancy of 



114 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Oliver Twist: as far away this must have been as 
the Hfetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it 
was just within my knowledge that my elders went 
for opera, to come back on us sounding those rich 
old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi 
and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite 
right; signs, of a rueful sound to us, that the 
line as to our infant participation was somewhere 
drawn. It had not been drawn, I all the more like 
to remember, when, under proper protection, at 
Castle Garden, I listened to that rarest of infant 
phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair 
that had been pushed to the footlights and an- 
nouncing her incomparable gift. She was about 
of our own age, she was one of us, even though at 
the same time the most prodigious of fairies, of 
glittering fables. That principle of selection was 
indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mother 
either at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's — I am vague 
about the occasion, but the names, as for fine old 
confused reasons, plead alike to my pen — and 
paid a homage quite other than critical, I dare 
say, to the then slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, 
Countess Rossi, who struck us as supremely ele- 
gant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with 
whom there had been for certain members of our 
circle some contact or intercourse that I have won- 
deringly lost. I learned at that' hour in any case 
what "acclamation" might mean, and have again 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 115 

before me the vast high-piled auditory thundering 
applause at the beautiful pink lady's clear bird- 
notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my 
sole other memory of concert-going, at that age, 
save the impression of a strange huddled hour in 
some smaller public place, some very minor hall, 
under dim lamps and again in my mother's com- 
pany, where we were so near the improvised plat- 
form that my nose was brushed by the petticoats 
of the distinguished amateur who sang ''Casta 
Diva," a very fine fair woman with a great heaving 
of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ring- 
letted Italian gentleman in black velvet and a 
romantic voluminous cloak who represented, or 
rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, 
an Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I 
crouched gaping, of quite bellowing down my 
throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert 
for a charity, with the volunteer performance and 
the social patroness, and it had squeezed in where 
it would — at the same time that I somehow con- 
nect the place, in Broadway, on the right going 
down and not much below Fourth Street (except 
that everything seems to me to have been just 
below Fourth Street when not just above,) with 
the scene of my great public exposure somewhat 
later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor Blitz, the 
peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his enter- 
tainment with W. J. and our frequent comrade of 



116 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the early time "Hal" Coster, practised on my 
innocence to seduce me to the stage and there 
plunge me into the shame of my sad failure to 
account arithmetically for his bewilderingly sub- 
tracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs 
and playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I 
once more, and with the same wan despair, feel 
my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their 
snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical 
fingers, reach me from the benches. 

The second definite matter in the Dickens con- 
nection is the Smike of Miss Weston — whose 
prsenomen I frivolously forget (though I fear it 
was Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. 
Davenport and then, sequently to some public 
strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews — in a 
version of Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly man- 
aged to be all tearful melodrama, long-lost found- 
lings, wicked Ralph Nickleby s and scowling Arthur 
Grides, with other baffled villains, and scarcely at 
all Crummleses and Kenwigses, much less Squeer- 
ses; though there must have been something of 
Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike 
and for the broad Yorkshire effect, a precious 
theatrical value, of John Brodie. The inefface- 
ability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of 
Nicholas's starved and tattered and fawning and 
whining protege; in face of my sharp retention of 
which through all the years who shall deny the 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 117 

immense authority of the theatre, or that the 
stage is the mightiest of modern engines? Such 
at least was to be the force of the Dickens imprint, 
however appHed, in the soft clay of our genera- 
tion; it was to resist so serenely the wash of the 
waves of time. To be brought up thus against 
the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of 
one's early consciousness of it and of his presence 
and power, is to begin to tread ground at once 
sacred and boundless, the associations of which, 
looming large, warn us off even while they hold. 
He did too much for us surely ever to leave us 
free — free of judgment, free of reaction, even 
should we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid 
his hand on us in a way to undermine as in no 
other case the power of detached appraisement. 
We react against other productions of the general 
kind without "liking" them the less, but we some- 
how Hked Dickens the more for having forfeited 
half the claim to appreciation. That process be- 
longs to the fact that criticism, roundabout him, 
is somehow futile and tasteless. His own taste is 
easily impugned, but he entered so early into the 
blood and bone of our intelligence that it always 
remained better than the taste of overhauling him. 
When I take him up to-day and find myself hold- 
ing off, I simply stop : not holding off, that is, but 
holding on, and from the very fear to do so ; which 
sounds, I recognise, like perusal, like renewal, of the 



118 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

scantest. I don't renew, I wouldn't renew for the 
world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so 
hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth, let in the 
intellectual air. Happy the house of life in which 
such chambers still hold out, even with the draught 
of the intellect whistling through the passages. 
We were practically contemporary, contemporary 
with the issues, the fluttering monthly numbers — 
that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, 
constituted for us in itself romance, on which 
nothing, to the end, succeeds in laying its hands. 
The whole question dwells for me in a single 
small reminiscence, though there are others still: 
that of my having been sent to bed one evening, 
in Fourteenth Street, as a very small boy, at an 
hour when, in the library and under the lamp, one 
of the elder cousins from Albany, the youngest of 
an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's 
most extravagant adoption, had begun to read 
aloud to my mother the new, which must have 
been the first, instalment of David Copperfield. 
I had feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated 
to cover close at hand, the friendly shade of some 
screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind 
which and glued to the carpet, I held my breath 
and listened. I listened long and drank deep 
while the wondrous picture gre^, but the tense 
cord at last snapped under the strain of the Murd- 
stones and I broke into the sobs of sympathy that 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 119 

disclosed my subterfuge. I was this time effec- 
tively banished, but the ply then taken was in- 
effaceable. I remember indeed just afterwards 
finding the sequel, in especial the vast extrusion 
of the Micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; 
which took a few years to grow adequate — years 
in which the general contagious consciousness, and 
our own household response not least, breathed 
heavily through Hard Times, Bleak House and 
Little Dorrit; the seeds of acquaintance with Chuz- 
zlewit and Dombey and Son, these coming thickly 
on, I had found already sown. I was to feel that I 
had been born, born to a rich awareness, under the 
very meridian; there sprouted in those years no 
such other crop of ready references as the golden 
harvest of Copperfield. Yet if I was to wait to 
achieve the happier of these recognitions I had 
already pored over Oliver Twist — albeit now un- 
certain of the relation borne by that experience to 
the incident just recalled. When Oliver was new 
to me, at any rate, he was already old to my bet- 
ters; whose view of his particular adventures and 
exposures must have been concerned, I think, 
moreover, in the fact of my public and lively won- 
der about them. It was an exhibition deprecated 
— to infant innocence I judge; unless indeed my 
remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms of 
fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house 
is due mainly to the existence there of George 



120 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Cruikshank's splendid form of the work, of which 
our own foreground was clear. It perhaps even 
seemed to me more Cruikshank's than Dickens's; 
it was a thing of such vividly terrible images, and 
all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that 
the offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and 
figures intended to comfort and cheer, present 
themselves under his hand as but more subtly 
sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the 
frank badnesses and horrors. The nice people 
and the happy moments, in the plates, frightened 
me almost as much as the low and the awkward; 
which didn't however make the volumes a source 
of attraction the less toward that high and square 
old back-parlour just westward of Sixth Avenue 
(as we in the same street were related to it) that 
formed, romantically, half our alternative domes- 
tic field and offered to our small inquiring steps 
a larger range and privilege. If the Dickens of 
those years w^as, as I have just called him, the 
great actuality of the current imagination, so I 
at once meet him in force as a feature even of con- 
ditions in which he was but indirectly involved. 

For the other house, the house we most haunted 
after our own, was that of our cousin Albert, still 
another of the blest orphans, though this time of 
our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as 
I have hinted, to attribute to orphans as orphans 
a circumstantial charm, a setting necessarily more 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 121 

delightful than our father' d and mother' d one, so 
there spread about this appointed comrade, the 
perfection of the type, inasmuch as he alone was 
neither brother' d nor sister' d, an air of possibilities 
that were none the less vivid for being quite in- 
definite. He was to embody in due course, poor 
young man, some of these possibilities — those that 
had originally been for me the vaguest of all; but 
to fix his situation from my present view is not 
so much to wonder that it spoke to me of a wild 
freedom as to see in it the elements of a rich and 
rounded picture. The frame was still there but a 
short time since, cracked and empty, broken and 
gaping, like those few others, of the general over- 
grown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; 
and this has somehow helped me to read back into 
it the old figures and the old long story, told as 
with excellent art. We knew the figures well 
while they lasted and had with them the happiest 
relation, but without doing justice to their truth 
of outline, their felicity of character and force of 
expression and function, above all to the com- 
positional harmony in which they moved. That 
lives again to my considering eyes, and I admire 
as never before the fine artistry of fate. Our 
cousin's guardian, the natural and the legal, was 
his aunt, his only one, who was the cousin of our 
mother and our own aunt, virtually our only one, 
so far as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship 



122 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

went; and the three, daughters of two sole and 
much-united sisters, had been so brought up to- 
gether as to have quite all the signs and accents 
of the same strain and the same nest. The cousin 
Helen of our young prospect was thus all but the 
sister Helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to 
happen, and was scarcely less a stout brave pres- 
ence and an emphasised character for the new gen- 
eration than for the old; noted here as she is, in 
particular, for her fine old-time value of clearness 
and straightness. I see in her strong simplicity, 
that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of 
better manners and better morals and homelier 
beliefs, the very elements of some portrait by a 
grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she 
looks out with some of the strong marks, the 
anxious honesty, the modest humour, the folded 
resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, 
the important composed cap, almost the badge of 
a guild or an order, that hang together about the 
images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who 
have had, as one may say, the courage of their 
character, and qualify them for places in great col- 
lections. I note with appreciation that she was 
strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest 
impression both that no one was ever better, and 
that her goodness somehow testifies for the whole 
tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private 
decencies. Her value to my imagination is even 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 123 

most of all perhaps in her mere local cpnsistency, 
her fine old New York ignorance and'rigour. Her 
traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close 
to her — they were all she needed, and she lived by 
them candidly and stoutly. That there have been 
persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show 
us how societies grow. A proportionately small 
amount of absolute conviction about it will carry, 
we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere 
comparative. She was as anxious over hers indeed 
as if it had ever been in question — which is a 
proof perhaps that being void of imagination, when 
you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more 
for comfort than having too much, which only 
makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or 
even at the worst for a questioned veracity. With 
a big installed conscience there is virtue in a grain 
of the figurative faculty — it acts as oil to the stiff 
machine. 

Yet this life of straight and narrow insistences 
seated so clearly in our view didn't take up all the 
room in the other house, the house of the pictured, 
the intermittent Oliver, though of the fewer books 
in general than ours, and of the finer proportions 
and less peopled spaces (there were but three per- 
sons to fill them) as well as of the more turbaned 
and powdered family portraits, one of these, the 
most antique, a "French pastel," which must have 
been charming, of a young collateral ancestor who 



124 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

had died on the European tour. A vast marginal 
range seemed to me on the contrary to surround 
the adolescent nephew, who was some three years, 
I judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons 
and prospects than ours. No question of "Eu- 
rope," for him, but a patriotic preparation for 
acquaintance with the South and West, or what 
was then called the West — he was to "see his 
own country first," winking at us while he did so; 
though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly 
and naturally neighbour' d and brother'd with us 
that the extensions of his range and the charms of 
his position counted somehow as the limits and the 
humilities of ours. He went neither to our schools 
nor to our hotels, but hovered out of our view in 
some other educational air that I can't now point 
to, and had in a remote part of the State a vast 
wild property of his own, known as the Beaver- 
kill, to which, so far from his aunt's and his 
uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and 
to which also he vainly invited W. J. and me, 
pointing thereby to us, however, though indirectly 
enough perhaps, the finest childish case we were to 
know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. 
It was apparently not to be thought of that in- 
stead of the inevitable we should accept the invi- 
tation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably 
distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from 
the railroad, through every danger of flood and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 125 

field, with prowling bears thrown in and probable 
loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, 
from swinging scythes and axes; but we of course 
measured our privation just by those facts, and 
grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe 
that pleasures beyond price had been cruelly 
denied us. I at any rate myself grew up suflS- 
ciently to wonder if poor Albert's type, as it de- 
veloped to the anxious elder view from the first, 
mightn't rather have undermined countenance; 
his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being 
suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to 
himself than to us may well have appeared symp- 
toms of the course, of the "rig," he was eventually 
to run. I could think of him but as the fils de 
famille ideally constituted; not that I could then 
use for him that designation, but that I felt he 
must belong to an important special class, which he 
in fact formed in his own person. Everything was 
right, truly, for these felicities — to speak of them 
only as dramatic or pictorial values; since if we 
were present all the while at more of a drama than 
we knew, so at least, to my vague divination, the 
scene and the figures were there, not excluding the 
chorus, and I must have had the instinct of their 
being as right as possible. I see the actors move 
again through the high, rather bedimmed rooms — 
it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight, 
lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part 



126 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and perfect for the picture, which gave a sense of 
fulness without ever being crowded. 

That composition had to wait awhile, in the 
earliest time, to find its proper centre, having been 
from the free point of view I thus cultivate a little 
encumbered by the presence of the most aged of 
our relatives, the oldest person I remember to have 
familiarly known — if it can be called familiar to 
have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of 
accomplished time: our Great-aunt Wyckoff, our 
maternal grandmother's elder sister, I infer, and 
an image of living antiquity, as I figure her to-day, 
that I was never to see surpassed. I invest her in 
this vision with all the idol-quality that may accrue 
to the venerable — solidly seated or even throned, 
hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big pro- 
tective protrusive ears to her chair which helped 
it to the effect of a shrine, and a large face in 
which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of a 
couple of other touches suggested the conven- 
tional marks of a painted image. She signified her 
wants as divinities do, for I recover from her 
presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of 
her only that, as described by her companions, the 
pious ministrants, she had "said" so and so when 
she hadn't spoken at all. Was she really, as she 
seemed, so tremendously old, so old that her 
daughter, our mother's cousin Helen and ours, 
would have had to come to her in middle life to 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 127 

account for it, or did antiquity at that time set in 
earlier and was surrender of appearance and dress, 
matching the intrinsic decay, only more compla- 
cent, more submissive and, as who should say, 
more abject? I have my choice of these supposi- 
tions, each in its way of so lively an interest that 
I scarce know which to prefer, though inclining 
perhaps a little to the idea of the backward reach. 
If Aunt Wyckoff was, as I first remember her, 
scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills 
me with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, 
our so generally greater and nobler effect of dura- 
tion: who wouldn't more subtly strive for that 
effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, 
than such non-questioners of fate? — the moral of 
whose case is surely that if they gave up too soon 
and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the 
process and fight the whole ground. But I apolo- 
gise to the heavy shade in question if she had 
really drained her conceivable cup, and for that 
matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange 
is the pleasure of finding the past — the Past 
above all — answered for to one's own touch, this 
being our only way to be sure of it. It was the 
Past that one touched in her, the American past 
of a preponderant unthinkable queerness; and 
great would seem the fortune of helping on the 
continuity at some other far end. 



X 

IT was at all events the good lady's disappear- 
ance that more markedly cleared the decks — 
cleared them for that long, slow, sustained 
action with which I make out that nothing was 
afterwards to interfere. She had sat there under 
her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, 
on the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; 
but these presences acted from that time but with 
cautious reserves. A brave, finished, clear-eyed 
image of such properties as the last-named, in par- 
ticular, our already -mentioned Alexander Robert- 
son, a faint and diminished replica of whose picture 
(the really fine original, as I remember it, having 
been long since perverted from our view) I lately 
renewed acquaintance with in a pious institution 
of his founding, where, after more than one push 
northward and some easy accommodations, he 
lives on into a world that knows him not and of 
some of the high improvements of which he can 
little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had 
personally known there was a feature or two still 
extant; the legend of his acres and his local con- 
cerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, 
was considerably cherished by us, though for our- 

128 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 129 

selves personally the relics of his worth were a lean 
feast to sit at. They were by some invidious turn 
of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our 
young kinsman, the orphaned and administered 
ills de famille, whose father, Alexander Wyckoff, 
son of our great-aunt and one of the two brothers 
of cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me 
through the ominous haze that preceded the worst 
visitation of cholera New York was to know. 
Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of 
that visitation, I evoke as with something of a 
premature baldness, of a blackness of short whisker, 
of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless 
pomp of manner, appeared to have quite predom- 
inantly "come in" for the values in question, which 
he promptly transmitted to his small motherless 
son and which were destined so greatly to increase. 
There are clues I have only lost, not making out 
in the least to-day why the sons of Aunt Wyckoff 
should have been so happily distinguished. Our 
great-uncle of the name isn't even a dim ghost to 
me — he had passed away beyond recall before I 
began to take notice; but I hold, rightly, I feel, 
that it was not to his person these advantages 
were attached. They could have descended to our 
grandmother but in a minor degree — we should 
otherwise have been more closely aware of them. 
It comes to me that so far as we had at all been 
aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: I have still 



130 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

in my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," appa- 
rently in the general country of the Beaverkill, 
which had come to my mother and her sister as 
their share of their grandfather Robertson's am- 
plitude, among the further-apportioned shares of 
their four brothers, only to be sacrificed later on 
at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of 
"lands" at a distance and in regions imperfectly 
reclaimed to be spoken of always as immense, and 
I at any rate entertained the sense that we should 
have been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, 
if we had only taken more interest. Our interests 
were peculiarly urban — though not indeed that 
this had helped us much. Something of the mys- 
tery of the vanished acres hung for me about my 
maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who 
appeared to have been in respect to the dim pos- 
sessions much on the spot, but I too crudely failed 
of my chance of learning from him what had be- 
come of them. 

Not that they had seen him, poor gentleman, 
very much further, or that I had any strong sense 
of opportunity; I catch at but two or three pro- 
jections of him, and only at one of his standing 
much at his ease: I see him before the fire in the 
Fourteenth Street library, sturdy, with straight 
black hair and as if the Beaverkill had rather 
stamped him, but clean-shaven; in a "stock" and 
a black frock-coat — I hear him perhaps still more 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 131 

than I see him deUver himself on the then great 
subject of Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have 
emerged from the wilderness to listen to and as 
to whom I remember thinking it (strange small 
critic that I must have begun to be) a note of the 
wilderness in him that he spoke of her as "Miss 
Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less 
have known then, what other form he could have 
used. The rest of my sense of him is tinged with 
the ancient pity — that of our so exercised response 
in those years to the general sad case of uncles, 
aunts and cousins obscurely aiOBicted (the uncles in 
particular) and untimely gathered. Sharp to me 
the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday 
afternoon, in Clinton Place, at the house of my 
uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my 
mother's family, where the hapless younger brother 
lay dying; whom I was taken to the top of the 
house to see and of the sinister twilight grimness 
of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of 
tobacco and of drugs, or of some especial strong 
drug, in one of the chambers of what I remember 
as a remote and unfriended arching attic, prob- 
ably in fact the best place of prescribed quiet, I 
was to carry away a fast impression. All the 
uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to 
seem sooner or later to be dying, more or less 
before our eyes, of melancholy matters; and yet 
their general story, so far as one could read it, 



132 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

appeared the story of life. I conceived at any 
rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely and good- 
naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the 
far-off Robertson acres, which on their side had 
been sacrificed to I never knew what. The point 
of my divagation, however, is that the Barmecide 
banquet of another tract of the same provenance 
was always spread for us opposite the other house, 
from which point it stretched, on the north side of 
the street, to Sixth Avenue; though here we were 
soon to see it diminished at the corner by a struc- 
ture afterwards known to us as our prosiest New 
York school. This edifice, devoted to-day to other 
uses, but of the same ample insignificance, still 
left for exploitation at that time an uncovered 
town-territory the transmitted tale of which was 
that our greatgrandfather, living down near the 
Battery, had had his country villa or, more 
strictly speaking, his farm there, with free expanses 
roundabout. Shrunken though the tract a part 
of it remained — in particular a space that I re- 
member, though with the last faintness, to have 
seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open- 
air cafe, a haunt of dance and song and of other 
forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The subsequent 
conversion of the site into the premises of the 
French Theatre I was to be able to note more 
distinctly; resorting there in the' winter of 1874-5, 
though not without some wan detachment, to a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 133 

series of more or less exotic performances, and 
admiring in especial the high and hard virtuosity 
of Madame Ristori, the unfailing instinct for the 
wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. 
Rousby (I still hear the assured "Great woman, 
great woman!" of a knowing friend met as I went 
out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as 
well as to a truth not quite measurable among 
us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the 
blighted John Toole. 

These are glimmering ghosts, though that 
drama of the scene hard by at which I have 
glanced gives me back its agents with a finer in- 
tensity. For the long action set in, as I have 
hinted, with the death of Aunt Wyckoff, and, if 
rather taking its time at first to develop, main- 
tained to the end, which was in its full finahty 
but a few years since, the finest consistency and 
unity; with cousin Helen, in rich prominence, for 
the heroine; with the pale adventurous Albert for 
the hero or young protagonist, a little indeed in 
the sense of a small New York Orestes ridden by 
Furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first 
of the heroine's highly respectable but quite neg- 
ligible husband and, second, of her close friend 
and quasi-sister our own admirable Aunt; with 
Alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, 
the eccentric, the attaching Henry, for the stake, 
as it were, of the game. So for the spectator did 



134 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the figures distribute themselves; the three prin- 
cipal, on the large stage — it became a field of 
such spreading interests — well in front, and the 
accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt com- 
ment and rich resonance, hovering in the back- 
ground, responsive to any call and on the spot at 
a sign: this most particularly true indeed of our 
anything but detached Aunt, much less a passive 
recipient than a vessel constantly brimming, and 
destined herself to become the outstanding agent, 
almost the dea ex machina, in the last act of the 
story. Her colleague of the earlier periods (though 
to that title she would scarce have granted his 
right) I designate rather as our earnest cousin's 
husband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; 
since he was "Mr." to his own wife, for whom the 
dread of liberties taken in general included even 
those that might have been allowed to herself: 
he had not in the least, like the others in his case, 
married into the cousinship with us, and this 
apparently rather by his defect than by ours. 
His christian name, if certainly not for use, was 
scarce even for ornament — which consorted with 
the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention 
and with the fact that no man could on his journey 
through life well have been less eagerly designated 
or apostrophised. If there are persons as to whom 
the "Mr." never comes up at all, so there are 
those as to whom it never subsides; but some of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 135 

them all keep it by the greatness and others, oddly 
enough, by the smallness of their importance. 
The subject of my present reference, as I think of 
him, nevertheless — by which I mean in spite of 
his place in the latter group — greatly helps my 
documentation; he must have been of so excellent 
and consistent a shade of nullity. To that value, 
if value it be, there almost always attaches some 
question of the degree and the position: with ad- 
juncts, with a relation, the zero may figure as a 
numeral — and the neglected zero is mostly, for 
that matter, endowed with a consciousness and 
subject to irritation. For this dim little gentle- 
man, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no 
redress, from the beginning to the end of his 
career, were made or entertained or projected; no 
question of how to treat him, or of how he might 
see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was 
blank from whatever view, remaining so under 
application of whatever acid or exposure to what- 
ever heat; the one identity he could have was to 
be part of the consensus. 

Such a case is rare — that of being no case at 
all, that of not having even the interest of the 
grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch 
glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments 
— they have at least sometimes the importance of 
feeling the weight of our tread. The phenomenon 
was here quite other — that of a natural platitude 
that had never risen to the level of sensibility. 



136 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

When you have been wronged you can be righted, 
when you have suffered you can be soothed; if 
you have that amount of grasp of the "scene," 
however humble, the drama of your Hfe to some 
extent enacts itseK, with the logical consequence 
of your being proportionately its hero and having 
to be taken for such. Let me not dream of at- 
tempting to say for what cousin Helen took her 
spectral spouse, though I think it the most marked 
touch in her portrait that she kept us from ever 
knowing. She was a person about whom you 
knew everything else, but there she was genially 
inscrutable, and above all claimed no damages on 
the score of slights offered him. She knew noth- 
ing whatever of these, yet could herself be much 
wounded or hurt — which latter word she sounded 
in the wondrous old New York manner so irre- 
ducible to notation. She covered the whole case 
with a mantle which was yet much more probably 
that of her real simplicity than of a feigned uncon- 
sciousness; I doubt whether she knew that men 
could be amiable in a different manner from that 
which had to serve her for supposing her husband 
amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it 
were very different she failed, or at least she feared, 
to conclude to amiability — though some women 
(as different themselves as such stranger men!) 
might take it for that. Directly interrogated she 
might (such was the innocence of these long- 
extinct manners) have approved of male society in 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 137 

stronger doses or more vivid hues — save where 
consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, 
to which she greatly deferred, had honestly im- 
posed it. The singular thing for the drama to 
which I return was that there it was just consan- 
guinity that had made the burden difficult and 
strange and of a nature to call on great decisions 
and patient plans, even though the most ominous 
possibilities were not involved. I reconstruct and 
reconstruct of course, but the elements had to my 
childish vision at least nothing at all portentous; 
if any light of the lurid played in for me just a 
little it was but under much later information. 
What my childish vision was really most possessed 
of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, 
the dim little gentleman, as I have called him, 
pacing the whole length of the two big parlours, 
in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been 
the deck of one of those ships anciently haunted 
by him, as "supercargo" or whatever, in strange 
far seas — according to the only legend connected 
with him save that of his early presumption in 
having approached, such as he was, so fine a 
young woman, and his remarkable luck in having 
approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly 
renewed for him, since it was also part of the 
legend that he had previously married and lost a 
bride beyond his deserts. 



XI 

I AM, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit 
to Albert, who at times sociably condescended 
to my fewer years — I still appreciate the 
man-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for 
the minute to have left me, and I am attached but 
to the rich perspective in which "Uncle" (for 
Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle) comes 
and goes; out of the comparative high brownness 
of the back room, commanding brave extensions, 
as I thought them, a covered piazza over which, in 
season, Isabella grapes accessibly clustered and 
beyond which stretched, further, a "yard" that 
was as an ample garden compared to ours at home; 
I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base 
of which his arms are interlocked behind him, and 
I know how his bald head, yet with the hair 
bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the 
sides, is thrust inquiringly, not to say appealingly, 
forward; I assist at his emergence; where the fine 
old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back 
on what used to seem to me silver wheels, into 
the brighter yet colder haK of the scene, and at- 
tend him while he at last looks out awhile into 
Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be 

138 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 139 

remarkably, objectionably or mercifully taking 
place there; and then I await his regular return, 
preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indif- 
ferent as I innocently am to his discoveries or his 
comments. It is cousin Helen however who pref- 
erentially takes them up, attaching to them the 
right importance, which is for the moment the 
very greatest that could possibly be attached to 
anything in the world; I for my part occupied 
with those marks of character in our pacing com- 
panion — his long, slightly equine countenance, 
his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of 
alarm, and the so limited play from side to side 
of his extremely protrusive head, as if somehow 
through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that 
he habitually wore and that, wound and re-wound 
in their successive stages, made his neck very long 
without making it in the least thick and reached 
their climax in a proportionately very small knot 
tied with the neatest art. I scarce can have known 
at the time that this was as complete a Httle old- 
world figure as any that might then have been 
noted there, far or near; yet if I didn't somehow 
"subtly" feel it, why am I now so convinced that 
I must have had familiarly before me a master- 
piece of the great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier, 
or any other then contemporary projector of 
Monsieur Prudhomme, the timorous Philistine in 
a world of dangers, with whom I was later on to 



140 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

make acquaintance? I put myself the question, of 
scant importance though it may seem; but there 
is a reflection perhaps more timely than any answer 
to it. I catch myself in the act of seeing poor 
anonymous ''Dear," as cousin Helen confined her- 
self, her life long, to calHng him, in the light of an 
image arrested by the French genius, and this in 
truth opens up vistas. I scarce know what it 
doesnH suggest for the fact of sharpness, of inten- 
sity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagi- 
nation almost any dance, making me ask myself 
quite most of all whether a person so marked by 
it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure. 
That degree of finish was surely rare among us — 
rare at a time when the charm of so much of the 
cousinship and the uncleship, the kinship gener- 
ally, had to be found in their so engagingly dis- 
pensing with any finish at all. They happened to 
be amiable, to be delightful; but — I think I have 
already put the question — what would have be- 
come of us all if they hadn't been.^ a question the 
shudder of which could never have been suggested 
by the presence I am considering. He too was 
gentle and bland, as it happened — and I indeed 
see it all as a world quite unfavourable to arro- 
gance or insolence or any hard and high assump- 
tion; but the more I think of him (even at the risk 
of thinking too much) the more I make out in him 
a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 141 

Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he 
hadn't so spoken of an order in which forms still 
counted it might scarce have occurred to one 
that there had ever been any. It comes over me 
therefore that he testified — and perhaps quite 
beautifully; I remember his voice and his speech, 
which were not those of that New York at all, and 
with the echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of 
where he could possibly have picked such things 
up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled 
things; from what finer civilisation therefore had 
they come down to him? To brood on this the 
least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open up 
vistas — out of the depths of one of which fairly 
glimmers the queerest of questions. Mayn't we 
accordingly have been, the rest of us, all wrong, 
and the dim little gentleman the only one among 
us who was right? May not his truth to type 
have been a matter that, as mostly typeless our- 
selves, we neither perceived nor appreciated? — so 
that if, as is conceivable, he felt and measured the 
situation and simply chose to be bland and quiet 
and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero with- 
out the laurel as well as a martyr without the 
crown. The light of which possibility is, however, 
too fierce; I turn it off, I tear myself from the 
view — noting further but the one fact in his his- 
tory that, by my glimpse of it, quite escapes am- 
biguity. The youthful Albert, I have mentioned. 



142 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

was to resist successfully through those years 
that solicitation of "Europe" our own response to 
which, both as a general and a particular solution, 
kept breaking out in choral wails; but the other 
house none the less nourished projects so earnest 
that they could invoke the dignity of comparative 
silence and patience. The other house didn't as- 
pire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand 
tour, of which ours was on many grounds inca- 
pable. Only after years and when endless things 
had happened — Albert having long before, in es- 
pecial, quite taken up his stake and ostensibly 
dropped out of the game — did the great adven- 
ture get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the 
liveliest illustrations of the irony of fate. What 
had most of all flushed through the dream of it 
during years was the legend, at last quite antedi- 
luvian, of the dim little gentleman's early Wander- 
jahre, that experience of distant lands and seas 
which would find an application none the less 
lively for having had long to wait. It had had to 
wait in truth half a century, yet its confidence had 
apparently not been impaired when New York, 
on the happy day, began to recede from view. 
Europe had surprises, none the less, and who 
knows to what extent it may after haK a century 
have had shocks? The coming true of the old 
dream produced at any rate a snap of the tense 
cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 143 

in the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, 
disembarked in England only to indulge in the last 
of his startled stares, only to look about him in 
vague deprecation and give it all up. He just 
landed and died; but the grand tour was none the 
less proceeded with — cousin Helen herself, aided 
by resources personal, social and financial that 
left nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, 
though as with a feeling of delicacy about it firmly 
overcome. 

But it has taken me quite out of the other 
house, so that I patch up again, at a stroke, that 
early scene of her double guardianship at which 
my small wonder assisted. It even then glim- 
mered on me, I think, that if Albert was, all so 
romantically, in charge of his aunt — which was 
a perfectly nondescript relation — so his uncle 
Henry, her odd brother, was her more or less legal 
ward, not less, despite his being so very much 
Albert's senior. In these facts and in the char- 
acter of each of the three persons involved resided 
the drama; which^must more or less have begun, 
as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a 
date I seem to have seized, definitely emerged from 
rustication — the Beaverkill had but for a certain 
term protected, or promoted, his simplicity — and 
began, on his side, to pace the well-worn field 
between the Fourteenth Street windows and the 
piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there less 



144 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he 
was afterwards to loom so much larger, whereas 
his companion, even while still present, was weakly 
to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I 
devise for that companion a possible history; the 
simple-minded Henry's annals on the other hand 
grew in interest as soon as they became interesting 
at all. This happened as soon as one took in the 
ground and some of the features of his tutelage. 
The basis of it all was that, harmless as he ap- 
peared, he was not to be trusted; I remember how 
portentous that truth soon looked, both in the 
light of his intense amiability and of sister Helen's 
absolute certitude. He wasn't to be trusted — it 
was the sole very definite fact about him except 
the fact that he had so kindly come down from the 
far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfect 
demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself 
among us to point the whole moral himself. He 
appeared, from the moment we really took it in, to 
be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; 
he exposed himself to our invidious gaze, on this 
ground, with a humility, a quiet courtesy and an 
instinctive dignity that come back to me as sim- 
ply heroic. He had himself accepted, under stren- 
uous suggestion, the dreadful view, and I see him 
to-day, in the light of the gran(| denouement, de- 
ferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it 
came, as fairly sublime in his decision not to put 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 145 

anyone in the wrong about him a day sooner than 
he could possibly help. The whole circle of us 
would in that event be so dreadfully "sold," as to 
our wisdom and justice, he proving only noble and 
exquisite. It didn't so immensely matter to him 
as that, the establishment of his true character 
didn't; so he went on as if for all the years — and 
they really piled themselves up: his passing for a 
dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his pas- 
sions from the moment he was allowed the where- 
withal in the least to indulge them, was a less evil 
for him than seeing us rudely corrected. It was 
in truth an extraordinary situation and would 
have offered a splendid subject, as we used to say, 
to the painter of character, the novelist or the 
dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had 
read David Copperfield an analogy glimmered — 
it struck me even in the early time: cousin Henry 
was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin 
Helen was in her relation to him more or less an- 
other Miss Trotwood. There were disparities in- 
deed: Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on that 
lady's premises, but she admired him and ap- 
pealed to him; lunatics, in her generous view, might 
be oracles, and there is no evidence, if I correctly 
remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick 
was suffered to indulge his passions but on ten 
cents a day, while his fortune, under conscientious, 
under admirable care — cousin Helen being no 



146 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

less the wise and keen woman of business than 
the devoted sister — rolled up and became large; 
likewise Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the 
perplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold 
in it, that represented poor Henry's only form of 
criticism of adverse fate. They had alike the large 
smooth open countenance of those for whom life 
has been simplified, and if Mr. Dick had had a 
fortune he would have remained all his days as 
modestly vague about the figure of it as our rela- 
tive consented to remain. The latter's interests 
were agricultural, while his predecessor's, as we 
remember, were mainly historical; each at any 
rate had in a general way his Miss Trotwood, not 
to say his sister Helen. 

The good Henry's Miss Trotwood lived and 
died without an instant's visitation of doubt as to 
the due exercise of her authority, as to what would 
happen if it faltered; her victim waiting in the 
handsomest manner till she had passed away to 
show us all — all who remained, after so long, to do 
him justice — that nothing but what was charm- 
ing and touching could possibly happen. This 
was, in part at least, the dazzling denouement I 
have spoken of: he became, as soon as fortunate 
dispositions could take effect, the care of our admi- 
rable Aunt, between whom and his sister and him- 
self close cousinship, from far back, had practically 
amounted to sisterhood: by which time the other 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 147 

house had long been another house altogether, 
its ancient site relinquished, its contents planted 
afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked, 
though with that of its great friendliness to all of 
us, for our mother's sake, still confirmed. Here 
with brief brightness, clouded at the very last, the 
solution emerged; we became aware, not without 
embarrassment, that poor Henry at large and 
supplied with funds was exactly as harmless and 
blameless as poor Henry stinted and captive; as 
to which if anything had been wanting to our 
confusion or to his own dignity it would have been 
his supreme abstinence, his suppression of the 
least "Didn't I tell you?" He didn't even pre- 
tend to have told us, when he so abundantly 
might, and nothing could exceed the grace with 
which he appeared to have noticed nothing. He 
"handled" dollars as decently, and just as pro- 
fusely, as he had handled dimes; the only Hght 
shade on the scene — except of course for its being 
so belated, which did make it pathetically dim — 
was the question of how nearly he at all measured 
his resources. Not his heart, but his imagination, 
in the long years, had been starved; and though 
he was now all discreetly and wisely encouraged to 
feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks to 
almost half a century of over-discipline, he failed 
quite to rise to his estate. He did feel rich, just 
as he felt generous; the misfortune was only in his 



148 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

weak sense for meanings. That, with the whole 
situation, made delicacy of the first importance; 
as indeed what was perhaps most striking in the 
entire connection was the part played by delicacy 
from the first. It had all been a drama of the 
delicate: the consummately scrupulous and suc- 
cessful administration of his resources for the ben- 
efit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over, 
in the event, without the leakage of a fraction, 
what was that but a triumph of delicacy? So deli- 
cacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him; the case 
having been from the early time that, could he 
only be regarded as sufficiently responsible, could 
the sources of his bounty be judged fairly open to 
light pressure (there was question of none but the 
lightest) that bounty might blessedly flow. This 
had been Miss Trot wood's own enlightened view, 
on behalf of one of the oddest and most appealing 
collections of wistful wondering single gentle- 
women that a great calculating benevolence per- 
haps ever found arrayed before it — ornaments 
these all of the second and third cousinship and 
interested spectators of the almost inexpressible 
facts. 

I should have liked completely to express them, 
in spite of the difficulty — if not indeed just by 
reason of that; the difficulty qf their consisting 
so much more of "character" than of "incident" 
(heaven save the artless opposition!) though this 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 149 

last element figured bravely enough too, thanks 
to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's 
wild wilfulness. He was so weak — after the most 
approved fashion of distressing young men of 
means — that his successive exhibitions of it had a 
fine high positive effect, such as would have served 
beautifully, act after act, for the descent of the 
curtain. The issue, however (differing in this 
from the common theatrical trick) depended less 
on who should die than on who should live; the 
younger of cousin Helen's pair of wards — putting 
them even only as vessels of her attempted earnest- 
ness — had violently broken away, but a remedy 
to this grief, for reasons too many to tell, dwelt in 
the possible duration, could it only not be ar- 
rested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the 
second the guileless Henry's. The single gentle- 
women, to a remarkable number, whom she re- 
garded and treated as nieces, though they were 
only daughters of cousins, were such objects of 
her tender solicitude that, she and Henry and 
Albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to 
think of was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' 
prospective wealth. There were contingencies of 
course — and they exactly produced the pity and 
terror. Her estate would go at her death to her 
nearest of kin, represented by her brother and 
nephew; it would be only of her savings — fortu- 
nately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen. 



150 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

zealous and long continued — that she might dis- 
pose by will; and it was but a troubled comfort 
that, should he be living at the time of her death, 
the susceptible Henry would profit no less than 
the wanton Albert. Henry was at any cost to be 
kept in life that he might profit; the woeful ques- 
tion, the question of delicacy, for a woman de- 
voutly conscientious, was how could anyone else, 
how, above all, could fifteen other persons, be 
made to profit by his profiting? She had been as 
earnest a steward of her brother's fortune as if 
directness of pressure on him, in a sense favourable 
to her interests — that is to her sympathies, which 
were her only interests — had been a matter of 
course with her; whereas in fact she would have 
held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in 
the least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive 
his nephew — and he was older, though, as would 
appear, so much more virtuous — his inherited 
property, she being dead, would accrue to that 
unedifying person. There was the pity; and as for 
the question of the disposition of Henry's savings 
without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in 
that, alas, was the terror. Henry's savings — 
there had been no terror for her, naturally, in 
beautifully husbanding his resources for him — 
dangled, naturally, with no small vividness, before 
the wistful gentlewomen, to whom, if he had but 
had the initiative, he might have made the most 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 151 

princely presents. Such was the oddity, not to 
say the rather tragic drollery, of the situation : that 
Henry's idea of a present was ten cents' worth of 
popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that 
when one had created for him a world of these 
proportions there was no honest way of inspiring 
him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous 
though these would be with the generosity of his 
nature as shown by the exuberance of his pop- 
corn. The ideal solution would be his flashing to 
intelligence just long enough to apprehend the 
case and, of his own magnanimous movement, sign 
away everything; but that was a fairy-tale stroke, 
and the fairies here somehow stood off. 

Thus between the wealth of her earnestness and 
the poverty of her courage — her dread, that is, 
of exposing herself to a legal process for undue 
influence — our good lady was not at peace; or, 
to be exact, was only at such peace as came to 
her by the free bestowal of her own accumulations 
during her lifetime and after her death. She pre- 
deceased her brother and had the pang of feehng 
that if half her residuum would be deplorably di- 
verted the other half would be, by the same stroke, 
imperfectly applied; the artless Henry remained at 
once so well provided and so dimly inspired. Here 
was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but one; 
and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure 
of the final scene, than which nothing could well 



152 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

have been happier, on all the premises, save for a 
single flaw: the installation in Forty -fourth Street 
of our admirable aunt, often, through the later 
years, domiciled there, but now settled to com- 
munity of life with a touching charge and repre- 
senting near him his extinguished, their extin- 
guished, sister. The too few years that followed 
were the good man's Indian summer and a very 
wonderful time — so charmingly it shone forth, 
for all concerned, that he was a person fitted to 
adorn, as the phrase is, almost any position. Our 
admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disin- 
terested than his former protectress, had yet much 
more imagination; she had enough, in a word, 
for perfect confidence, and under confidence what 
remained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a gar- 
den freshly watered. Sad alas the fact that so 
scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however, 
and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it 
was, as I have already noted, as if he had all the 
while known, as if he had really been a conscious 
victim to the superstition of his blackness. His 
final companion recognised, as it were, his powers; 
and it may be imagined whether when he abso- 
lutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomen 
she passed him, or not, the blessed pen. He had 
taken a year or two to pubHsh by his behaviour 
the perfection of his civility, and so, on that safe 
ground, made use of the pen. His competence was 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 153 

afterwards attacked, and it emerged triumphant, 
exactly as his perfect charity and humiHty and 
amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of haK a 
century, did. He had bowed his head and some- 
times softly scratched it during that immense 
period; he had occasionally, after roaming down- 
stairs with the troubled fold in his brow and the 
diflScult, the smothered statement on his lips (his 
vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of 
pleading explanation, often found too complicated 
by the witty,) retired once more to his room some- 
times indeed for hours, to think it all over again; 
but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or 
punctuality or regularity, never failed of one of 
the virtues his imputed indifference to which had 
been the ground of his discipline. It was very 
extraordinary, and of all the stories I know is I 
think the most beautiful — so far at least as he 
was concerned ! The flaw I have mentioned, the 
one break in the final harmony, was the death of 
our admirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own 
and while, taken with illness at the same time, he 
lay there deprived of her attention. He had that 
of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the 
wisest and tenderest being deputed by the others; 
and if his original estate reverted at law they 
presently none the less had occasion to bless his 
name. 



XII 



I TURN round again to where I last left myself 
gaping at the old ricketty bill-board in Fifth 
Avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as 
ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it 
most often blazed with the rich appeal of Mr. Bar- 
num, whose "lecture-room," attached to the Great 
American Museum, overflowed into posters of all 
the theatrical bravery disavowed by its title. It 
was my rueful theory of those days — though 
tasteful I may call it too as well as rueful — that 
on all the holidays on which we weren't dragged 
to the dentist's we attended as a matter of course 
at Barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to 
be able to; which, to my own particular conscious- 
ness, wasn't every time the case. The case was 
too often, to my melancholy view, that W. J., 
quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, re- 
paired to this seat of joy with the easy Albert — 
he at home there and master of the scene to a 
degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at 
the best arrive; he quite moulded, truly, in those 
years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic bent and the 
determination of curiosity, I seem to make out, 
by the general Barnum association and revelation. 

154 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 155 

It was not, I hasten to add, that I too didn't, to 
the extent of my minor chance, drink at the 
spring; for how else should I have come by the 
whole undimmed sense of the connection? — the 
weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid 
bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill di- 
oramas, for the lecture-room, the true centre of 
the seat of joy, to open: vivid in especial to me is 
my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't 
be rapt away before it did open. The impression 
appears to have been mixed; the drinking deep 
and the holding out, holding out in particular 
against failure of food and of stage-fares, pro- 
vision for transport to and fro, being questions 
equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in 
its essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our re- 
sources that even the sustaining doughnut of the 
refreshment-counter would mock our desire and 
the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway 
and further, seem to defy repetition. Those des- 
perate days, none the less, affect me now as having 
flushed with the very complexion of romance; their 
aches and inanitions were part of the adventure; 
the homeward straggle, interminable as it ap- 
peared, flowered at moments into rapt contempla- 
tions — that for instance of the painted portrait, 
large as life, of the celebrity of the hour, then 
"dancing" at the Broadway Theatre, Lola Montes, 
Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal 



156 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the 
throat. 

It was thus quite in order that I should pore 
longest, there at my fondest corner, over the Bar- 
num announcements — my present inability to be 
superficial about which has given in fact the meas- 
ure of my contemporary care. These announce- 
ments must have been in their way marvels of 
attractive composition, the placard bristling from 
top to toe with its analytic ''synopsis of scenery 
and incidents"; the synoptical view cast its net 
of fine meshes and the very word savoured of in- 
cantation. It is odd at the same time that when I 
question memory as to the living hours themselves, 
those of the stuffed and dim little hall of audience, 
smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the 
curtain rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, 
two performances only stand out for me, though 
these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess 
and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles — I see that 
still as the blazonry of one of them, just as I see 
Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the face, coifed 
in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls 
and clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans- 
down, shout at the top of her lungs that a 
"pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of 
the minion who should start on the spot to do her 
bidding at some desperate crisis that I forget. I 
forget Huon the serf, whom I yet recall immensely 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 157 

admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but 
Miss Mestayer, who gave form to my conception 
of the tragic actress at her highest. She had a 
hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast pro- 
tuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close 
moist ringlets; I say always, for I was to see her 
often again, during a much later phase, the mid- 
most years of that Boston Museum which aimed 
at so vastly higher a distinction than the exploded 
lecture-room had really done, though in an age 
that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked 
the courage to call itself a theatre. She must have 
been in comedy, which I believe she also usefully 
and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but 
there was no one like her in the Boston time for 
cursing queens and eagle-beaked mothers; the 
Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would 
have been unproducible without her; she had a 
rusty, rasping, heaving and tossing "authority" 
of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I am 
revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after 
age when she had come, comparatively speaking, 
into her own — the sight of her, accidentally in- 
curred, one tremendously hot summer night, as 
she slowly moved from her lodgings or wherever, 
in the high Bowdoin Street region, down to the not 
distant theatre from which even the temperature 
had given her no reprieve; and well remember how, 
the queer light of my young impression playing 



158 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

up again in her path, she struck me as the very 
image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a 
worn and weary, a battered even though almost 
sordidly smoothed, thing of the theatre, very much 
as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello 
of the orchestra might have been. It was but an 
effect doubtless of the heat that she scarcely 
seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though 
somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, 
wrapt in a gauzy sketch of a dressing-gown, she 
pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of 
thankless personal service, of the reverse of the 
picture, of the cost of "amusing the public" in a 
case of amusing it, as who should say, every hour. 
And I had thrilled before her as the Countess 
in "Love" — such contrasted combinations ! But 
she carried her head very high, as with the habit 
of crowns and trains and tirades — had in fact 
much the air of some deposed and reduced sov- 
ereign living on a scant allowance; so that, all in- 
visibly and compassionately, I took off my hat to 
her. 

To which I must add the other of my two Bar- 
numite scenic memories, my having anciently ad- 
mired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her 
swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and 
her flight across the ice-blocks of the Ohio, if I 
rightly remember the perilous stream, intrepidly 
and gracefully performed. We lived and moved 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 159 

at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's 
novel — which, recaUing my prompt and charmed 
acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute 
for The Initials, earlier mentioned here, as my 
first experiment in grown-up fiction. There was, 
however, I think, for that triumphant work no 
classified condition; it was for no sort of reader 
as distinct from any other sort, save indeed for 
Northern as differing from Southern: it knew the 
large f eHcity of gathering in alike the small and the 
simple and the big and the wise, and had above all 
the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an 
immense number of people, much less a book than 
a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in 
which they didn't sit and read and appraise and 
pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed 
and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe 
was the irresistible cause, generally conducted 
themselves. Appreciation and judgment, the whole 
impression, were thus an effect for which there had 
been no process — any process so related having in 
other cases had to be at some point or other criti- 
cal; nothing in the guise of a written book, there- 
fore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and 
"noticed," probably ever reached its mark, the 
mark of exciting interest, without having at least 
groped for that goal as a book or by the exposure 
of some literary side. Letters, here, languished 
unconscious, and Uncle Tom, instead of making 



160 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

even one of the cheap short cuts through the 
medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in 
water, went gaily roundabout it altogether, as if a 
fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had simply flown 
through the air. This feat accomplished, the sur- 
prising creature could naturally fly anywhere, and 
one of the first things it did was thus to flutter 
down on every stage, literally without exception, 
in America and Europe. If the amount of life 
represented in such a work is measurable by the 
ease with which representation is taken up and 
carried further, carried even violently furthest, the 
fate of Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it 
simply sat down wherever it lighted and made 
itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes 
flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its 
height again and went, with all its vivacity and 
good faith, through all its motions. 

These latter were to leave me, however, with a 
fonder vision still than that of the comparatively 
jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first exhi- 
bition of them to spring to the front was the fine 
free rendering achieved at a playhouse till then 
ignored by fashion and culture, the National The- 
atre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes 
had come faintest to ears polite, but where a 
sincerity vivid though rude was now supposed to 
reward the curious. Our numerous attendance 
there under this spell was my first experience of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 161 

the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed it in our 
time — each emotion and impression of which is 
as fresh to me as the most recent of the same 
family. Precious through all indeed perhaps is 
the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of 
my small encouraged state as a free playgoer — a 
state doubly wondrous while I thus evoke the full 
contingent from Union Square; where, for that 
matter, I think, the wild evening must have been 
planned. I am lost again in all the goodnature 
from which small boys, on wild evenings, could 
dangle so unchidden — since the state of unchid- 
denness is what comes back to me well-nigh 
clearest. How without that complacency of con- 
science could every felt impression so live again? 
It is true that for my present sense of the matter 
snubs and raps would still tingle, would count 
double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that 
I mirror myself in these depths of propriety. The 
social scheme, as we knew it, was, in its careless 
charity, worthy of the golden age — though I 
can't sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at 
its easiest and its safest: the fruits dropped right 
upon the board to which we flocked together, the 
least of us and the greatest, with differences of 
appetite and of reach, doubtless, but not with 
differences of place and of proportionate share. 
My appetite and my reach in respect to the more 
full-bodied Uncle Tom might have brooked 



162 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

certainly any comparison; I must have partaken 
thoroughly of the feast to have left the various 
aftertastes so separate and so strong. It was a 
great thing to have a canon to judge by — it 
helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on 
wings (for use ever after) to the shoulders of ap- 
preciation. In the light of that advantage I 
could be sure my second Eliza was less dramatic 
than my first, and that my first "Cassy," that of 
the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy of the 
lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady 
at the National prosaic and placid (I could already 
be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just as on the other 
hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with 
the desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for 
a leap from one to the other, had here less of the 
audible creak of carpentry, emulated a trifle more, 
to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's 
pump. They can't, even at that, have emulated 
it much, and one almost envies (quite making up 
one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of 
an age beguiled by arts so rude. 

However, the point exactly was that we attended 
this spectacle just in order not to be beguiled, just 
in order to enjoy with ironic detachment and, at 
the very most, to be amused ourselves at our sen- 
sibility should it prove to have been trapped and 
caught. To have become thus aware of our col- 
lective attitude constituted for one small spectator 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 163 

at least a great initiation; he got his first ghmpse 
of that possibiHty of a "free play of mind" over a 
subject which was to throw him with force at a 
later stage of culture, when subjects had consider- 
ably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew 
Arnold. So he is himself at least interested in 
seeing the matter — as a progress in which the 
first step was taken, before that crude scenic ap- 
peal, by his wondering, among his companions, 
where the absurd, the absurd for them, ended and 
the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the 
tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itseK, 
briefly, might be legitimately and tastefully held 
to begin. Uncanny though the remark perhaps, 
I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the 
pulse of our party, under my tiny recording thumb, 
than in the beat of the drama and the shock of its 
opposed forces — vivid and touching as the con- 
trast was then found for instance between the 
tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girl clad in a pina- 
fore of sackcloth and destined to become for 
Anglo-Saxon millions the type of the absolute in 
the artless, and her httle mistress the blonde Eva, 
a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of panta- 
lettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite 
suicidally, with her elbows out and a preliminary 
shriek, on that bulwark of the Mississippi steam- 
boat which was to facilitate her all but fatal 
immersion in the flood. Why should I have duly 



164 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

noted that no little game on her part could well 
less have resembled or simulated an accident, and 
yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, 
rescued from the river but perfectly dry, in the 
arms of faithful Tom, who had plunged in to save 
her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, 
than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless 
romp? I could count the white stitches in the 
loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story 
rich and harmonious; I could know we had all 
intellectually condescended and that we had yet 
had the thrill of an aesthetic adventure; and this 
was a brave beginning for a consciousness that 
was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity 
that was to be nothing if not restless. 

The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I 
insist on prolonging a little further, is doubtless 
in my instinct to grope for our earliest aesthetic 
seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands 
by which they were sown, but practically ap- 
pointed none the less to cause that peculiarly flur- 
ried hare to run — flurried because over ground 
so little native to it — when so many others held 
back. Is it that air of romance that gilds for me 
then the Barnum background — taking it as a 
symbol; that makes me resist, to this effect of a 
passionate adverse loyalty, any impulse to trans- 
late into harsh terms any old sdrdidities and pov- 
erties? The Great American Museum, the down- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 165 

town scenery and aspects at large, and even the 
up-town improvements on them, as then flourish- 
ing? — why, they must have been for the most 
part of the last meanness: the Barnum picture 
above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or 
frame stuck about with innumerable flags that 
waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious 
relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say 
nothing of the promise within of the still more 
monstrous and abnormal living — from the total 
impression of which things we plucked somehow 
the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice 
proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at 
Niblo's, which represented in our scheme the ideal 
evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day; so 
that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting 
there under the rich cover of night (which was 
the supreme charm,) how it comes that this larger 
memory hasn't swallowed up all others. For 
here, absolutely, was the flower at its finest and 
grown as nowhere else — grown in the great gar- 
den of the Ravel Family and offered again and 
again to our deep inhalation. I see the Ravels, 
French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists, as 
representing, for our culture, pure grace and 
charm and civility; so that one doubts whether any 
candid community was ever so much in debt to a 
race of entertainers or had so happy and pro- 
longed, so personal and grateful a relation with 



166 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

them. They must have been, with their offshoots 
of Martinettis and others, of three or four genera- 
tions, besides being of a rich theatrical stock 
generally, and we had our particular friends and 
favourites among them; we seemed to follow them 
through every phase of their career, to assist at 
their tottering steps along the tight-rope as very 
small children kept in equilibrium by very big 
balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in 
case of falls;) to greet them as Madame Axel, of 
robust maturity and in a Spanish costume, bound- 
ing on the same tense cord more heavily but more 
assuredly; and finally to know the climax of the 
art with them in Raoul or the Night-Owl and 
Jocko or the Brazilian Ape — and all this in the 
course of our own brief infancy. My impression 
of them bristles so with memories that we seem 
to have rallied to their different productions with 
much the same regularity with which we formed 
fresh educational connections; and they were so 
much our property and our pride that they sup- 
ported us handsomely through all fluttered enter- 
tainment of the occasional Albany cousins. I re- 
member how when one of these visitors, wound up, 
in honour of New York, to the very fever of per- 
ception, broke out one evening while we waited 
for the curtain to rise, "Oh don't you hear the 
cries.'* They're beating them, I'm sure they are; 
can't it be stopped.^" we resented the charge as a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 167 

slur on our very honour; for what our romantic 
relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a 
hushed-up manner from behind, was the sounds 
attendant on the application of blows to some 
acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. 
Impossible such horrors in the world of pure 
poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a temple of 
illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, 
though its abords of stony brown Metropolitan 
Hotel, on the "wrong side," must have been bleak 
and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. 
What more pathetic for instance, so that we pub- 
licly wept, than the fate of wondrous Martinetti 
Jocko, who, after befriending a hapless French 
family wrecked on the coast of Brazil and bringing 
back to life a small boy rescued from the waves 
(I see even now, with every detail, this inanimate 
victim supine on the strand) met his death by 
some cruel bullet of which I have forgotten the 
determinant cause, only remembering the final 
agony as something we could scarce bear and a 
strain of our sensibility to which our parents re- 
peatedly questioned the wisdom of exposing us. 

These performers and these things were in all 
probability but of a middling skill and splendour — 
it was the pre-trapeze age, and we were caught 
by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in 
them, something sweet and sympathetic, was after 
all a value, whether of their own humanity, their 



168 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

own special quality, or only of our innocence, never 
to be renewed; but I light this taper to the initia- 
tors, so to call them, whom I remembered, when 
we had left them behind, as if they had given us a 
silver key to carry oS and so to refit, after long 
years, to sweet names never thought of from then 
till now. Signor Leon Javelli, in whom the French 
and the Italian charm appear to have met, who 
was he, and what did he brilliantly do, and why of 
a sudden do I thus recall and admire him? I am 
afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most 
domestic of our friends' resources, as it brought 
them out, by the far stretch of the rope, into the 
bosom of the house and against our very hearts, 
where they leapt and bounded and wavered and 
recovered closely face to face with us; but I dare 
say he bounded, brave Signor Leon, to the greatest 
height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, 
connect him with that revelation of the ballet, 
the sentimental-pastoral, of other years, which, in 
The Four Lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson 
as in words of one syllable, but all quick and gay 
and droll, would have affected us as classic, I am 
sure, had we then had at our disposal that term 
of appreciation. When we read in English story- 
books about the pantomimes in London, which 
somehow cropped up in them so often, those were 
the only things that didn't make us yearn; so much 
we felt we were masters of the type, and so almost 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 169 

sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London con- 
stantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation- 
scene, it was true, though what this really seemed 
to come to was clown and harlequin taking liber- 
ties with policemen — these last evidently a sharp 
note in a picturesqueness that we lacked, our own 
slouchy "officers" saying nothing to us of that 
sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and colum- 
bine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew 
moreover all about clowns, for we went to circuses 
too, and so repeatedly that when I add them to 
our list of recreations, the good old orthodox cir- 
cuses under tents set up in vacant lots, with which 
New York appears at that time to have bristled, 
time and place would seem to have shrunken for 
most other pursuits, and not least for that of 
serious learning. And the case is aggravated 
as I remember Franconi's, which we more or less 
haunted and which, aiming at the grander style 
and the monumental effect, blazed with fresh paint 
and rang with Roman chariot-races up there among 
the deserts of Twenty -ninth Street or wherever; 
considerably south, perhaps, but only a little 
east, of the vaster desolations that gave scope to 
the Crystal Palace, second of its name since, fol- 
lowing — not passibus cequis, alas — the London 
structure of 1851, this enterprise forestalled by a 
year or two the Paris Palais de ITndustrie of 1855. 
Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those 



170 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

occasions on which I dragged — if I must here 
once more speak for myself only — after Albany 
cousins through its courts of edification: I remem- 
ber being very tired and cold and hungry there, in 
a little light drab and very glossy or shiny "talma" 
breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole-em- 
broideries; though concomitantly conscious that 
I was somehow in Europe, since everything about 
me had been "brought over," which ought to have 
been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so 
in some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain 
and the sense of the cousinly, the Albany, head- 
aches quite fade in that recovered presence of big 
European Art embodied in Thorwaldsen's enor- 
mous Christ and the Disciples, a shining marble 
company ranged in a semicircle of dark maroon 
walls. If this was Europe then Europe was beauti- 
ful indeed, and we rose to it on the wings of won- 
der; never were we afterwards to see great showy 
sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of 
whatever period or school, without some renewal 
of that charmed Thorwaldsen hour, some taste 
again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweet- 
ness with which the great white images had ajffected 
us under their supper-table gaslight. The Crystal 
Palace was vast and various and dense, which was 
what Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down 
jungle of impressions that were somehow chal- 
lenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 171 

foreign words and practices; over which formida- 
bly towered Kiss's mounted Amazon attacked by 
a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that day 
subhme and the glory of the place; so that I felt 
the journey back in the autumn dusk and the 
Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time) a re- 
lapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Four- 
teenth Street horizon from a far journey and a 
hundred looming questions that would still, tre- 
mendous thought, come up for all the personal 
answers of which one cultivated the seed. 



XIII 

IET me hurry, however, to catch again that 
J thread I left danghng from my glance at our 
I small vague spasms of school — my per- 
sonal sense of them being as vague and small, I 
mean, in contrast with the fuller and stronger cup 
meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much 
more privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; 
or at least much more interesting, though it might 
be wicked to call them more happy, through those 
numberless bereavements that had so enriched 
their existence. I mentioned above in particular 
the enviable consciousness of our little red-headed 
kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, 
snatched what gaiety he might from a Hfe to be 
cut short, in a cavalry dash, by one of the Con- 
federate bullets of 1863: he blew out at us, on 
New York Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs 
of the atmosphere of the Institution Charher — 
strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose in- 
stitutions was weak; but it was above all during a 
gregarious visit paid him in a livelier field still that 
I knew myself merely mother'd and brother'd. It 
had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and 

never at all the former — our aunt Janet had not 

172 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 173 

survived his birth ; but on this day of our collective 
pilgrimage to Sing-Sing, where he was at a ''mili- 
tary" school and clad in a fashion that represented 
to me the very panoply of war, he shone with a 
rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous and respon- 
sive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, 
that matched his physical activity — the most 
beautifully made athletic little person, and in the 
highest degree appealing and engaging — he not 
only did us the honours of his dazzling academy 
(dazzling at least to me) but had all the air of 
showing us over the great State prison which even 
then flourished near at hand and to which he 
accompanied us; a party of a composition that 
comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and 
Albany cousinships appearing to have converged 
and met, for the happy occasion, with the genera- 
tions and sexes melting together and moving in a 
loose harmonious band. The party must have 
been less numerous than by the romantic tradition 
or confused notation of my youth, and what I 
mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our 
being at once an attendant train to my aged and 
gentle and in general most unadventurous grand- 
mother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement 
roundabout the vivid Gussy, is our collective 
impression that State prisons were on the whole 
delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a 
gay, free circulation in corridors and on stairs, a 



174 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

pleasant prevalence of hot soup and fresh crusty 
rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly partook, 
and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny 
landings, much interesting light brush of gentle- 
men remarkable but for gentlemanly crimes — 
that is defalcations and malversations to striking 
and impressive amounts. 

I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot 
of a staircase and his having been announced to 
us by our conductor or friend in charge as likely 
to be there; and what a charm I found in his cool 
loose uniform of shining white (as I was afterwards 
to figure it,) as well as in his generally refined and 
distinguished appearance and in the fact that he 
was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the 
commendable act of paring his nails with a smart 
penknife and that he didn't allow us to interrupt 
him. One of my companions, I forget which, had 
advised me that in these contacts with illustrious 
misfortune I was to be careful not to stare ; and pres- 
ent to me at this moment is the wonder of whether 
he would think it staring to note that he quite 
stared, and also that his hands were fine and fair 
and one of them adorned with a signet ring. I 
was to have later in Hfe a glimpse of two or three 
dismal penitentiaries, places affecting me as sor- 
did, as dark and dreadful; but if the revelation of 
Sing-Sing had involved the idea of a timely warn- 
ing to the young mind my small sensibility at least 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 175 

was not reached by the lesson. I envied the bold- 
eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at his 
ease — we might have been his slaves — quite as 
much as I envied Gussy; in connection with which 
I may remark here that though in that early time 
I seem to have been constantly eager to exchange 
my lot for that of somebody else, on the assumed 
certainty of gaining by the bargain, I fail to re- 
member feeling jealous of such happier persons — 
in the measure open to children of spirit. I had 
rather a positive lack of the passion, and thereby, 
I suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy bears, 
as I think, on what one sees one's companions able 
to do — as against one's own falling short — envy, 
as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, 
or in other words of a certain sort of richer con- 
sciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely 
supposed, in them. They were so other — that 
was what I felt; and to be other, other almost any- 
how, seemed as good as the probable taste of the 
bright compound wistfully watched in the con- 
fectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of 
course, but as to which just this impossibihty and 
just that privation kept those active proceedings 
in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the 
question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor 
actual, the absence of all vision of how in any de- 
gree to change it, combined with a complacency, 
an acuity of perception of alternatives, though a 



176 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

view of them as only through the confectioner's 
hard glass — that is what I recover as the nearest 
approach to an apology, in the soil of my nature, 
for the springing seed of emulation. I never 
dreamed of competing — a business having in it 
at the best, for my temper, if not for my total 
failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity. If com- 
peting was bad snatching was therefore still worse, 
and jealousy was a sort of spiritual snatching. 
With which, nevertheless, all the while, one might 
have been "like" So-and-So, who had such hori- 
zons. A helpless little love of horizons I certainly 
cherished, and could sometimes even care for my 
own. These always shrank, however, under al- 
most any suggestion of a further range or finer 
shade in the purple rim offered to other eyes — and 
that is what I take for the restlessness of envy. It 
wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, 
with anyone at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" 
everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know 
whether to call the effect of this miserable or 
monstrous. It was the effect at least of self- 
abandonment — I mean to visions. 

There must have been on that occasion of the 
Sing-Sing day — which it deeply interests me to 
piece together — some state of connection for 
some of us with the hospitalities of Rhinebeck, 
the place of abode of the eldest of the Albany 
uncles — that is of the three most in our view; 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 177 

for there were two others, the eldest of all a 
half -uncle only, who formed a class quite by him- 
self, and the very youngest, who, with lively 
interests of his own, had still less attention for 
us than either of his three brothers. The house 
at Rhinebeck and all its accessories (which struck 
our young sense as innumerable,) in especial 
the great bluff of the Hudson on which it stood, 
yields me images scarcely dimmed, though as 
the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there 
at all events the gently-groaning — ever so gen- 
tly and dryly — Albany grandmother, with the 
Albany cousins as to whom I here discriminate, 
her two adopted daughters, maturest and mildest 
of the general tribe, must have paused for a stay; 
a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture 
with the New York contingent, somewhere socia- 
bly achieved, for the befriending of juvenile 
Gussy. It shimmers there, the whole circum- 
stance, with I scarce know what large innocence 
of charity and ease; the Gussy-pretext, for reun- 
ion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the 
simphcity of the interests and the doings, the 
assumptions and the concessions, each to-day so 
touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all 
gentle and generous together, floating in such a 
clean light social order, sweetly proof against en- 
nui — unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, 
never, never to feel bored — and thankful for 



178 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the smallest aesthetic or romantic mercies. My 
vision loses itself withal in vaster connections — 
above all in my general sense of the then grand 
newness of the Hudson River Railroad; so far at 
least as its completion to Albany was concerned, 
a modern blessing that even the youngest of us 
were in a position to appraise. The time had 
been when the steamboat had to content us — 
and I feel how amply it must have done so as I 
recall the thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the 
whole hour of the Albany waterside, the night of 
huge strange paddling and pattering and shriek- 
ing and creaking once ended, and contrast with it 
all certain long sessions in the train at an age and 
in conditions when neither train nor traveller had 
suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, 
as I recast them, but at the same time of mortal in- 
tensities of lassitude. The elements here indeed 
are much confused and mixed — I must have 
known that discipline of the hectic interest and the 
extravagant strain in relation to Rhinebeck only; 
an etape, doubtless, on the way to New York, for 
the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller 
patiences of any northward land- journey. And 
yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but the state 
of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the 
stops too repeated, but perversely engaging; the 
heat and the glare too great, but the river, by the 
window, making reaches and glimpses, so that 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 179 

the great swing of picture and force of light and 
colour were themselves a constant adventure; the 
uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too recurrent, 
to the creation of a positive soreness of sym- 
pathy, of curiosity, and yet constituting by their 
presence half the enlargement of the time. For 
the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, 
is somehow what most gives these hours their 
stamp for memory. I scarce know why, nor do 
I much, I confess, distinguish occasions — but I 
see what I see: the long, the rattling car of the 
old open native form and the old harsh native 
exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed, 
qualified however also by that of having in my 
hands a volume of M. Arsene Houssaye, Philo- 
sophes et Comediennes, remarkably submitted by 
one of my relatives to my judgment. I see them 
always, the relatives, in slow circulation; restless 
and nervous and casual their note, not less than 
strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, 
eclipses, that deprived their society of a tactless 
weight. They cheered us on, in their way; born 
optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones, 
they were always reassuring and sustaining, though 
with a bright brevity that must have taken im- 
mensities, I think, for granted. They wore their 
hats shghtly toward the nose, they strolled, they 
hung about, they reported of progress and of the 
company, they dropped suggestions, new maga- 



180 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

zines, packets of the edible deprecated for the im- 
mature; they figured in fine to a small nephew as 
the principal men of their time and, so far as the 
two younger and more familiar were concerned, 
the most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It 
was none the less to the least shining, though not 
essentially the least comforting, of this social trio 
that, if I rightly remember, I owed my introduc- 
tion to the chronique galante of the eighteenth 
century. 

There tags itself at any rate to the impression a 
flutter as of some faint, some recaptured, grimace 
for another of his kindly ofiices (which I associate 
somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his pro- 
duction for our vague benefit of a literary classic, 
the Confessions, as he called our attention to them, 
of the celebrated "Rosseau." I catch again the 
echo of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this 
communication, and recover as well my responsive 
advance toward a work that seemed so to prom- 
ise; but especially have I it before me that some 
play of light criticism mostly attended, on the part 
of any circle, this speaker's more ambitious re- 
marks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of 
appearance and type, it was Augustus James who 
spread widest, in default of towering highest, to 
my wistful view of the larger life, and who covered 
definite and accessible ground. This ground, the 
house and precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 181 

harboured our tender years, I surmise, but at few 
and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of 
these to make it the image of an hospitahty liberal 
as I supposed great social situations were liberal; 
suppositions on this score having in childhood (or 
at least they had in mine) as little as possible to 
do with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with 
great views and other glories, with gardens and 
graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of 
gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and 
quotedly droll; to say nothing, in particular, of 
our aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of 
Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free 
young waltzing-women in New York, and who 
floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture, 
aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome high- 
browed, high-nosed looseness, of dressing-gowns 
or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the delightful 
shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright be- 
nevolent steel that kept nipping for our charmed 
advantage: roses and grapes and peaches and cur- 
rant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and 
scraps of remark that fell as by quite a like flash 
of shears. These are mere scrapings of gold-dust, 
but my mind owes her a vibration that, however 
tiny, was to insist all these years on marking — 
on figuring in a whole complex of picture and 
drama, the clearest note of which was that of 
worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed 



182 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

outer galleries, through hot August evenings and 
amid the dim flare of open windows, to the hum of 
domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the 
part played, in the young mind naturally even 
though perversely, even though inordinately, ar- 
ranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition 
of appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, 
contacts and impressions not arriving at the dig- 
nity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste, as 
one may say, of the little intelligence, happening 
to be such as the fond fancy could assimilate. 
One's record becomes, under memories of this 
order — and that is the only trouble — a tale of 
assimilations small and fine; out of which refuse, 
directly interesting to the subject- victim only, 
the most branching vegetations may be conceived 
as having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the 
poor dear inward life — when translated, that is, 
and perhaps ineffectually translated, into terms 
of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the 
lines of the outward; a reflection that might stay 
me here weren't it that I somehow feel morally 
affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the elements 
involved. 

One of these was assuredly that my father had 
again, characteristically, suffered me to dangle; he 
having been called to Linwood by the dire trouble 
of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with 
him from Staten Island — I make the matter out 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 183 

as of the summer of '54. We had come up, he and 
I, to New York; but our doings there, with the 
journey following, are a blank to me; I recover 
but my sense, on our arrival, of being for the first 
time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining 
scene, roundabout, made more sinister — sharpened 
even to the point of my feeling abashed and irrele- 
vant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, 
under her brother's roof, had left her husband, 
wasted with consumption, near death at Albany; 
gravely ill herself — she had taken the disease 
from him as it was taken in those days, and was in 
the event very scantly to survive him — she had 
been ordered away in her own interest, for which 
she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in 
all his family most justly appealed and most anx- 
iously listened to, had been urged to come and 
support her in a separation that she passionately 
rejected. Vivid to me still, as floating across ve- 
randahs into the hot afternoon stillness, is the wail 
of her protest and her grief; I remember being 
scared and hushed by it and stealing away beyond 
its reach. I remember not less what resources of 
high control the whole case imputed, for my imag- 
ination, to my father; and how, creeping off to 
the edge of the eminence above the Hudson, I 
somehow felt the great bright harmonies of air 
and space becoming one with my rather proud 
assurance and confidence, that of my own connec- 



184 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

tion, for life, for interest, with such sources of 
Hght. The great impression, however, the one 
that has brought me so far, was another matter: 
only that of the close, lamp-tempered, outer even- 
ing aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere 
deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our 
breath for it, tenderly opposing his sister's purpose 
of flight, and the presence at my side of my young 
cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, 
exactly of my own age, and named in honour of 
her having been born in Paris, to the influence of 
which fact her shining black eyes, her small quick- 
ness and brownness, marking sharply her differ- 
ence from her sisters, so oddly, so almost extrav- 
agantly testified. It had come home to me by 
some voice of the air that she was "spoiled," and 
it made her in the highest degree interesting; we 
ourselves had been so associated, at home, without 
being in the least spoiled (I think we even rather 
missed it:) so that I knew about these subjects of 
invidious reflection only by literature — mainly, 
no doubt, that of the nursery — in which they 
formed, quite by themselves, a romantic class; 
and, the fond fancy always predominant, I prized 
even while a little dreading the chance to see the 
condition at work. This chance was given me, 
it was clear — though I risk in my record of it a 
final anticlimax — by a remark from my uncle 
Augustus to his daughter: seated duskily in our 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 185 

group, which included two or three dim dependent 
forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie 
should go to bed — expressed it, that is, with the 
casual cursory humour that was to strike me 
as the main expressional resource of outstanding 
members of the family and that would perhaps 
have had under analysis the defect of making judg- 
ment very personal without quite making authority 
so. Authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all 
so human outstanding ones; they made shift but 
with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a pe- 
culiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had 
been remarked but in the air, I feel sure, that 
Marie should seek her couch — a truth by the dark 
wing of which I ruefully felt myseK brushed; and 
the words seemed therefore to fall with a certain 
ironic weight. What I have retained of their ef- 
fect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objec- 
tion raised by my cousin and some sharper point 
to his sentence supplied by her father; promptly 
merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my 
young companion across the gallery as for refuge 
in the maternal arms, a protest and an appeal in 
short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase 
that was from that moment so preposterously to 
"count" for me. "Come now, my dear; don't 
make a scene — I insist on your not making a 
scene!" That was all the witchcraft the occasion 
used, but the note was none the less epoch-making. 



186 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one 
I had never heard — it had never been addressed 
to us at home; and who should say now what a 
world one mightn't at once read into it? It 
seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much 
about life. Life at these intensities clearly be- 
came "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense 
illumination, was that we could make them or not 
as we chose. It was a long time of course before 
I began to distinguish between those within our 
compass more particularly as spoiled and those 
producible on a different basis and which should 
involve detachment, involve presence of mind; 
just the qualities in which Marie's possible output 
was apparently deficient. It didn't in the least 
matter accordingly whether or no a scene was then 
proceeded to — and I have lost all count of what 
immediately happened. The mark had been made 
for me and the door flung open; the passage, gath- 
ering up all the elements of the troubled time, had 
been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had 
become aware with it of a rich accession of possi- 
bilities. 



XIV 

IT must have been after the Sing-Sing episode 
that Gussy came to us, in New York, for Sun- 
days and hohdays, from scarce further off than 
round the corner — his foreign Institution flour- 
ishing, I seem to remember, in West Tenth Street 
or wherever — and yet as floated by exotic airs 
and with the scent of the spice-islands hanging 
about him. He was being educated largely with 
Cubans and Mexicans, in those New York days 
more than half the little flock of the foreign Insti- 
tutions in general; over whom his easy triumphs, 
while he wagged his little red head for them, 
were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special 
sense of them was moreover by the similar situa- 
tion of his sister, older than he but also steeped 
in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing 
us queer echoes of the tongues. I remember being 
deputed by my mother to go and converse with 
her, on some question of her coming to us, at the 
establishment of Madame Reichhardt (pronounced, 
a la frangaise, Rechard,) where I felt that I 
had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of 
*' Europe " ; it being impressed on me by my cousin, 

who was tall and handsome and happy, with a 

187 



188 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we 
were to know again, that French only was speak- 
able on the premises. I sniffed it up aromatically, 
the superior language, in passage and parlour — 
it took the form of some strong savoury soup, an 
educational potage Rechard that must excellently 
have formed the taste: that was again, I felt as 
I came away, a part of the rich experience of being 
thrown in tender juvenile form upon the world. 
This genial girl, like her brother, was in the grand 
situation of having no home and of carrying on 
life, such a splendid kind of life, by successive 
visits to relations; though neither she nor Gussy 
quite achieved the range of their elder brother, 
"Bob" of that ilk, a handsome young man, a just 
blurred, attractive, illusive presence, who hovered 
a bit beyond our real reach and apparently dis- 
played the undomesticated character at its high- 
est. He seemed exposed, for his pleasure — if 
pleasure it was ! — and my wonder, to every as- 
sault of experience; his very name took on, from 
these imputations, a browner glow; and it was all 
in the right key that, a few years later, he should, 
after ^'showing some talent for sculpture," have 
gone the hapless way of most of the Albany youth, 
have become a theme for sad vague headshakes 
(kind and very pitying in his casej and died prema- 
turely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my 
conception, picturesquely. The headshakes were 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 189 

heavier and the sighs sharper for another shm 
shade, one of the younger and I beheve quite the 
most hapless of those I have called the outstand- 
ing ones; he too, several years older than we again, 
a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he too charm- 
ingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumb- 
ing to monstrous early trouble after having "shown 
some talent" for music. The ghostliness of these 
aesthetic manifestations, as I allude to them, is 
the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the 
faintest far-off twang of old chords; I ask myself, 
for the odd obscurity of it, under what inspiration 
music and sculpture may have tinkled and glim- 
mered to the Albany ear and eye (as we at least 
knew those organs) and with what queer and 
weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. 
Quite ineffably quaint and falot this proposition 
of that sort of resource for the battle of life as it 
then and there opened; and above all beautifully 
suggestive of our sudden collective disconnected- 
ness (ours as the whole kinship's) from the Amer- 
ican resource of those days, Albanian or other. 
That precious light was the light of "business" 
only; and we, by a common instinct, artlessly 
joining hands, went forth into the wilderness with- 
out so much as a twinkling taper. 

Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing 
— it brooked no exception; the word had been 
passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't 



190 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and shouldn't, understand these things, questions 
of arithmetic and of fond calculation, questions 
of the counting-house and the market; and we 
appear to have held to our agreement as loyally 
and to have accepted our doom as serenely as if 
our faith had been mutually pledged. The rup- 
ture with my grandfather's tradition and attitude 
was complete; we were never in a single case, I 
think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of 
business; the most that could be said of us was 
that, though about equally wanting, all round, in 
any faculty of acquisition, we happened to pay 
for the amiable weakness less in some connections 
than in others. The point was that we moved 
so oddly and consistently — as it was our only 
form of consistency — over our limited pasture, 
never straying to nibble in the strange or the steep 
places. What was the matter with us under this 
spell, and what the moral might have been for 
our case, are issues of small moment, after all, in 
face of the fact of our mainly so brief duration. 
It was given to but few of us to be taught by the 
event, to be made to wonder with the last inten- 
sity what had been the matter. This it would be 
interesting to worry out, might I take the time; 
for the story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any 
mere rueful glance at other avidities, the prefer- 
ence for ease, the play of the passions, the appe- 
tite for pleasure. These things have often accom- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 191 

panied the business imagination; just as the love 
of hfe and the love of other persons, and of many 
of the things of the world, just as quickness of 
soul and sense, have again and again not excluded 
it. However, it comes back, as I have already 
hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the 
world" could but present themselves; there were 
not enough of these, and they were not fine and 
fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, 
so much loose and crude attention. We hadn't 
doubtless at all a complete play of intelligence — 
if I may not so far discriminate as to say they 
hadn't; or our lack of the instinct of the market 
needn't have been so much worth speaking of: 
other curiosities, other sympathies might have 
redressed the balance. I make out our young 
cousin J. J. as dimly aware of this while composing 
the light melodies that preluded to his extinction, 
and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish 
us to think of as promising; but his image is more 
present to me still as the great incitement, during 
the few previous years, to our constant dream of 
"educational" relief, of some finer kind of social 
issue, through Europe. 

It was to Europe J. J. had been committed; he 
was over there forging the small apologetic arms 
that were so little to avail him, but it was quite 
enough for us that he pointed the way to the Pen- 
sion Sillig, at Vevey, which shone at us, from afar. 



192 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

as our own more particular solution. It was true 
that the Pension Sillig JBgured mainly as the solu- 
tion in cases of recognised wildness; there long 
flourished among New York parents whose view 
of such resources had the proper range a faith in 
it for that complaint; and it was as an act of faith 
that, failing other remedies, our young wifeless 
uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or 
for edification, had placed there his difficult son. 
He returned with delight from this judicious course 
and there was an hour when we invoked, to in- 
tensity, a similar one in our own interest and when 
the air of home did little but reflect from afar the 
glitter of blue Swiss lakes, the tinkle of cattle- 
bells in Alpine pastures, the rich bonhomie that 
M. Sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and 
honey and edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, com- 
bined with his celebrated firmness for tough sub- 
jects. Poor J. J. came back, I fear, much the 
same subject that he went; but he had verily per- 
formed his scant office on earth, that of having 
brought our then prospect, our apparent possi- 
bility, a trifle nearer. He seemed to have been 
wild even beyond M. Sillig's measure — which 
was highly disappointing; but if we might on the 
other hand be open to the reproach of falling too 
short of it there were establishments adapted to 
every phase of the American predicament; so 
that our general direction could but gain in vivid- 



\\ 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 193 

ness. I think with compassion, altogether, of the 
comparative obscurity to which our eventual suc- 
cess in gathering the fruits, few and scant though 
they might be, thus relegates those to whom it 
was given but to toy so briefly with the flowers. 
They make collectively their tragic trio: J. J. the 
elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed 
of the Albany uncles ; J. J. the younger — they 
were young together, they were luckless together, 
and the combination was as strange as the disaster 
was sweeping; and the daughter and sister, am- 
plest of the "natural," easiest of the idle, who 
lived on to dress their memory with every thread 
and patch of her own perfect temper and then 
confirm the tradition, after all, by too early and 
woeful an end. 

If it comes over me under the brush of multi- 
plied memories that we might well have invoked 
the educational "relief" I just spoke of, I should 
doubtless as promptly add that my own case must 
have been intrinsically of the poorest, and indeed 
make the point once for all that I should be taken 
as having seen and felt much of the whole queer- 
ness through the medium of rare inaptitudes. I 
can only have been inapt, I make out, to have re- 
tained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be 
aware of most of it now but as dim confusion, as 
bewildered anxiety. There was interest always, 
certainly — but it strikes me to-day as interest 



194 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

in everything that wasn't supposedly or prescrip- 
tively of the question at all, and in nothing that 
was so respectably involved and accredited. With- 
out some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now 
have the memories; but these stick to me somehow 
with none of the hard glue of recovered "spirits," 
recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. I can't 
have had, through it all, I think, a throb of as- 
surance or success; without which, at the same 
time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived and 
wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of 
everything but a general lucid consciousness (lucid, 
that is, for my tender years;) which I clutched 
with a sense of its value. What happened all the 
while, I conceive, was that I imagined things — 
and as if quite on system — wholly other than as 
they were, and so carried on in the midst of the 
actual ones an existence that somehow floated and 
saved me even while cutting me off from any degree 
of direct performance, in fact from any degree of 
direct participation, at all. There presumably was 
the interest — in the intensity and plausibility 
and variety of the irrelevance: an irrelevance 
which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, 
and especially all fellow-occupants of benches and 
desks, all elbowing and kicking presences within 
touch or view, so many monst.ers and horrors, 
so many wonders and splendours and mysteries, 
but never, so far as I can recollect, realities of re- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 195 

lation, dispensers either of knowledge or of fate, 
playmates, intimates, mere cosevals and coequals. 
They were something better — better above all 
than the coequal or coseval; they were so thor- 
oughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, 
and endowed in this light with a vividness that 
the mere reality of relation, a commoner directness 
of contact, would have made, I surmise, com- 
paratively poor. This superior shade of interest 
was not, none the less, so beguiling that I recall 
without unmitigated horror, or something very 
like it, a winter passed with my brother at the 
Institution Vergnes; our sorry subjection to which 
argues to my present sense an unmitigated sur- 
rounding aridity. To a "French school" must 
have been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping 
us in patience till easier days should come; in- 
finitely touching our parents' view of that New 
York fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of 
the languages" — an acquisition reinforcing those 
opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so far 
as they mustered, and at which I have briefly 
glanced. Charming and amusing to me indeed 
certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this su- 
perstition as it played about our path: ladies and 
gentlemen, dimly foreign, mere broken syllables 
of whose names come back to me, attending there 
to converse in tongues and then giving way to 
others through failures of persistence — whether 



196 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

in pupils or preceptors I know not. There hovers 
even Count Adam Gurowski, PoHsh, patriotic, 
exiled, temporarily famous, with the vision of his 
being invoked for facility and then relinquished 
for diflSculty; though I scarce guess on which of 
his battle-grounds — he was so polyglot that he 
even had a rich command of New Yorkese. 



XV 

IT is to the Institution Vergnes that my earhest 
recovery of the sense of being in any degree 
"educated with" W. J. attaches itseK; an 
establishment which occupied during the early 
'fifties a site in the very middle of Broadway, of 
the lower, the real Broadway, where it could throb 
with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all 
innocently rejoiced — believing it, I surmise, the 
liveliest conceivable: a fact that is by itself, in 
the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The 
lower Broadway — I allude to the whole Fourth 
Street and Bond Street (where now is the Bond 
Street of that antiquity?) — was then a seat of 
education, since we had not done with it, as I shall 
presently show, even when we had done with the 
Institution, a prompt disillusionment; and I brood 
thus over a period which strikes me as long and 
during which my personal hours of dihgence were 
somehow more than anything else hours of the 
pavement and the shopfront, or of such contem- 
plative exercise as the very considerable distance, 
for small legs, between those regions and the west- 
ward Fourteenth Street might comprise. Pedes- 
trian gaping having been in childhood, as I have 

197 



198 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

noted, prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have 
kindly provided for it on no small scale; to the 
extent even that it must have been really my sole 
and single form of athletics. Vague heated com- 
petition and agitation in the then enclosed Union 
Square would seem to point a little, among us all, 
to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for 
recreation, anything in the nature of a playground 
or a breathing-space, the Institution itself was 
serenely innocent. This I take again for a note 
extraordinarily mediaeval. It occupied the first 
and second floors, if I rightly remember, of a wide 
front that, overhanging the endless thoroughfare, 
looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and 
painfully dragged carts and the promiscuous hu- 
man shuffle — the violence of repercussions from 
the New York pavement of those years to be fur- 
ther taken into account; and I win it back from 
every side as, in spite of these aspects of garish 
publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite 
absurd, scene. I see places of that general time, 
even places of confinement, in a dusty golden light 
that special memories of small misery scarce in the 
least bedim, and this holds true of our next and 
quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of 
M. Vergnes alone darkles and shrinks to me — a 
sordidly black interior is my main image for it; 
attenuated only by its having very soon after- 
wards, as a suffered ordeal, altogether lapsed and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 199 

intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I distinguish 
M. Vergnes himself — quite "old," very old indeed 
as I supposed him, and highly irritated and mark- 
edly bristling; though of nothing in particular 
that happened to me at his or at anyone's else 
hands have I the scantest remembrance. What 
really most happened no doubt, was that my 
brother and I should both come away with a mind 
prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse 
Daudet's chronicle of "Jack," years and years 
later on; to make the acquaintance in that work 
of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack 
learnt the first lessons of life was to see the Insti- 
tution Vergnes at once revive, swarming as it did 
with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the 
complete failure of blondness that marks the mem- 
ory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so many 
of the New York "petits pays chauds," prepon- 
derantly brown and black and conducing to a 
greasy gloom. Into this gloom I fear I should 
see all things recede together but for a certain 
saHent note, the fact that the whole "staff" ap- 
pears to have been constantly in a rage; from 
which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness 
(the only accent we could pick up, though we were 
supposed to be learning, for the extreme impor- 
tance of it, quantities of French) and the sound of 
high vociferation. I remember infuriated ushers, 
of foreign speech and flushed complexion — the 



200 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

tearing across of hapless "exercises" and dictees 
and the hurtle through the air of dodged vol- 
umes; only never, despite this, the extremity of 
smiting. There can have been at the Institution 
no blows instructionally dealt — nor even from 
our hours of ease do any such echoes come back 
to me. Little Cubans and Mexicans, I make out, 
were not to be vulgarly whacked — in deference, 
presumably, to some latent relic or imputed sur- 
vival of Castilian pride; which would impose 
withal considerations of quite practical prudence. 
Food for reflection and comparison might well 
have been so suggested; interesting at least the 
element of contrast between such opposed con- 
ceptions of tone, temper and manner as the pas- 
sion without whacks, or with whacks only of in- 
animate objects, ruling the scene I have described, 
and the whacks without passion, the grim, im- 
personal, strictly penal applications of the rod, 
which then generally represented what was still 
involved in our English tradition. It was the two 
theories of sensibility, of personal dignity, that so 
diverged; but with such other divergences now 
on top of those that the old comparison falls away. 
We to-day go unwhacked altogether — though 
from a pride other than Castilian: it is difficult 
to say at least what ideal has thus triumphed. In 
the Vergnes air at any rate I seem myself to have 
sat unscathed and unterrified — not alarmed even 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 201 

by so much as a call to the blackboard; only- 
protected by my insignificance, which yet covered 
such a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us 
the whole affair, assuredly; but how much queerer 
for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so 
far for their privilege. We had come, compar- 
atively, but from round the corner — and that 
left the "state of education" and the range of 
selection all about as quaint enough. What could 
these things then have been in the various native 
climes of the petits pays chauds.^ 

It was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, 
that we were floated next into the quieter haven 
of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks — where cleaner 
waters, as I feel their coolness still, must have 
filled a neater though, it was true, slightly more 
contracted trough. Yet the range of selection had 
been even on this higher plane none too strikingly 
exemplified; our jumping had scant compass — 
we still grubbed with a good conscience in Broad- 
way and sidled about Fourth Street. But I think 
of the higher education as having there, from vari- 
ous causes, none the less begun to glimmer for 
us. A diffused brightness, a kind of high cross- 
light of conflicting windows, rests for me at all 
events on the little realm of Mr. Pulling Jenks 
and bathes it as with positively sweet limitations. 
Limited must it have been, I feel, with our couple 
of middling rooms, front and back, our close pack- 



202 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

ing, our large unaccommodating stove, our grey 
and gritty oilcloth, and again our importunate 
Broadway; from the aggregation of which ele- 
ments there distils itself, without my being able 
to account for it, a certain perversity of romance. 
I speak indeed here for myself in particular, and 
keen for romance must I have been in such con- 
ditions, I admit; since the sense of it had crept 
into a recreational desert even as utter as that 
of the Institution Vergnes. Up out of Broadway 
we still scrambled — I can smell the steep and 
cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into 
Broadway we dropped — I feel again the general- 
ised glare of liberation; and I scarce know what 
tenuity of spirit it argues that I should neither 
have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking 
again for myself only) a space wider than the 
schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. I 
literally conclude that we must have knocked 
about in Broadway, and in Broadway alone, like 
perfect little men of the world; we must have been 
let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, 
without prejudice either to our earlier and later 
freedoms of going and coming. I as strictly infer, 
at the same time, that Broadway must have been 
then as one of the alleys of Eden, for any sinister 
contact or consequence involved for us; a circum- 
stance that didn't in the least interfere, too, as I 
have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 203 

The interest verily could have been a calculated 
thing on the part of our dear parents as Httle as 
on that of Mr. Jenks himself. Therefore let it 
be recorded as still most odd that we should all 
have assented to such deficiency of landscape, 
such exiguity of sport. I take the true inward- 
ness of the matter to have been in our having such 
short hours, long as they may have appeared at 
the time, that the day left margin at the worst for 
private inventions. I think we found landscape, 
for ourselves — and wherever I at least found 
vision I found such sport as I was capable of — 
even between the front and back rooms and the 
conflicting windows; even by the stove which 
somehow scorched without warming, and yet 
round which Mr. Coe and Mr. Dolmidge, the 
drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving 
of a winter's day, used notedly, and in the case 
of Mr. Coe lamentedly, to draw out their delays. 
Is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this 
connection an effluence from Mr. Dolmidge and 
Mr. Coe, whose ministrations come back to me as 
the sole directly desired or invoked ones I was to 
know in my years, such as they were, of pupilage? 
I see them in any case as old-world images, fig- 
ures of an antique stamp; products, mustn't they 
have been, of an order in which some social rela- 
tivity or matter-of-course adjustment, some trans- 
mitted form and pressure, were still at work? Mr. 



204 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Dolmidge, inordinately lean, clean-shaved, as was 
comparatively uncommon then, and in a swallow- 
tailed coat and I think a black satin stock, was 
surely perfect in his absolutely functional way, a 
pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy and mild, 
who taught the most complicated flourishes — 
great scrolls of them met our view in the form of 
surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed eagles, 
the eagle being so calligraphic a bird — while he 
might just have taught resignation. He was 
not at all funny — no one out of our immediate 
family circle, in fact almost no one but W. J. him- 
self, who flowered in every waste, seems to have 
struck me as funny in those years; but he was to 
remain with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, 
one of the Phiz if not the Cruikshank pictures. 
Mr. Coe was another affair, bristling with the 
question of the "hard," but somehow too with 
the revelation of the soft, the deeply attaching; a 
worthy of immense stature and presence, crowned 
as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a 
great gathered or puckered cloak, with a vast vel- 
vet collar, and resembling, as he comes back to 
me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much 
in our eyes then. The oddity may well even at 
that hour have been present to me of its taking so 
towering a person to produce such small "draw- 
ing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid 
diminutive eggs. Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 205 

over the place, and though they were not of more 
than handy size — very small boys could set them 
up in state on very small desks — they had doubt- 
less a great range of number and effect. They 
were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; 
they represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, 
browsing and bristling beasts and other rural ob- 
jects; all rendered, as I recall them, in little de- 
tached dashes that were like stories told in words 
of one syllable, or even more perhaps in short 
gasps of delight. It must have been a stammer- 
ing art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for 
me moreover in richer though slightly vague asso- 
ciations. Mr. Coe practised on a larger scale, in 
colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little 
boards that make me to this day think of them 
and more particularly smell them, when I hear of 
a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness attends 
them as brought home by W. J. from the master's 
own place of instruction in that old University 
building which partly formed the east side of 
Washington Square and figures to memory, or to 
fond imagination, as throbbing with more oflfices 
and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than any 
reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so 
lost in quantity. Is there any present structure 
that plays such a part in proportion to its size? 
— though even as I ask the question I feel how 
nothing on earth is proportioned to present sizes. 



206 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

These alone are proportioned — and to mere sky- 
space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; 
which is comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps 
our needs and our elements were then absurdly, 
were then provincially few, and that the patches 
of character in that small grey granite compen- 
dium were all we had in general to exhibit. Let 
me add at any rate that some of them were 
exhibitional — even to my tender years, I mean; 
since I respond even yet to my privilege of pres- 
ence at some Commencement or Commemoration, 
such as might be natural, doubtless, to any "uni- 
versity," where, as under a high rich roof, before 
a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers 
and impressive applause, there was "speaking," 
of the finest sort, and where above all I gathered 
in as a dazzling example the rare assurance of 
young Winthrop Somebody or Somebody Win- 
throp, who, though still in jackets, held us spell- 
bound by his rendering of Serjeant Buzfuz's ex- 
posure of Mr. Pickwick. Long was I to marvel 
at the high sufficiency of young Winthrop Some- 
body or Somebody Winthrop — in which romantic 
impression it is perhaps after all (though with the 
consecration of one or two of the novels of the 
once-admired Theodore of that name, which so 
remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the 
place is embalmed. 

I must not forget indeed that Ithrow in also 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 207 

Mr. Coe — even if with less assured a hand; by 
way of a note on those higher flights of power and 
promise that I at this time began to see definitely 
determined in my brother. As I catch W. J.'s 
image, from far back, at its most characteristic, 
he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, 
especially under the lamplight of the Fourteenth 
Street back parlour; and not as with a plodding 
patience, which I think would less have affected 
me, but easily, freely and, as who should say, in- 
fallibly: always at the stage of finishing off, his 
head dropped from side to side and his tongue 
rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during 
which to see him at all was so to see him — the 
other flights and faculties removed him from my 
view. These were a matter of course — he re- 
curred, he passed nearer, but in his moments of 
ease, and I clearly quite accepted the ease of his 
disappearances. Didn't he always when within 
my view light them up and justify them by re- 
newed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole 
sense of him as formed for assimilations scarce 
conceivable made our gaps of contact too natural 
for me even to be lessons in humihty. Humility 
had nothing to do with it — as Httle even as envy 
would have had; I was below humility, just as 
we were together outside of competition, mutually 
*'hors concours." His competitions were with 
others — in which how wasn't he, how could he 
not be, successful? while mine were with nobody. 



208 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

or nobody's with me, which came to the same 
thing, as heaven knows I neither braved them nor 
missed them. That winter, as I recover it, repre- 
sents him as sufficiently within view to make his 
position or whereabouts in the upper air definite 
— I must have taken it for granted before, but 
could now in a manner measure it; and the fresh- 
ness of this sense, something serene in my com- 
placency, had to do, I divine, with the effect of 
our moving, with the rest of our company, which 
was not numerous but practically, but appreciably 
"select," on a higher and fairer plane than ever 
yet. Predominantly of course we owed this ben- 
efit to Richard Pulling himself; of whom I recall 
my brother's saying to me, at a considerably later 
time, and with an authority that affected me as 
absolute, that he had been of all our masters the 
most truly genial, in fact the only one to whom 
the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a sym- 
pathy could be in any degree imputed. I take 
this to have meant that he would have adorned a 
higher sphere — and it may have been, to explain 
his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a 
higher sphere he rapidly moved; I can account 
at least for our falling away from him the very 
next year and declining again upon baser things 
and a lower civilisation but by some probability 
of his flight, just thereafter effected, to a greater 
distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the 
town. Some years must have elapsed and some 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 209 

distinction have crowned him when, being briefly 
in New York together, W. J. and I called on him 
of a Sunday afternoon, to find — what I hadn't 
been at all sure of — that he still quite knew who 
we were, or handsomely pretended to ; handsomely 
in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of 
appearance with the Punch, husband to Judy, of 
the funny papers and the street show. Bald, ro- 
tund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the 
chin, the arched eye, the paunch and the harhiche^ 
to say nothing of the ferule nursed in his arms and 
with which, in the show, such free play is made, 
Mr. Jenks yet seems to me to have preserved a 
dignity as well as projected an image, and in fact 
have done other things besides. He whacked oc- 
casionally — he must have been one of the last 
of the whackers; but I don't remember it as ugly 
or dreadful or droll — don't remember, that is, 
either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: 
it fails somehow to break the spell of our civilisa- 
tion; my share in which, however, comes back to 
me as merely contemplative. It is beyond meas- 
ure odd, doubtless, that my main association with 
my "studies," whether of the infant or the ado- 
lescent order, should be with almost anything but 
the fact of learning — of learning, I mean, what I 
was supposed to learn. I could only have been 
busy, at the same time, with other pursuits — 
which must have borne some superficial likeness 



210 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

at least to the acquisition of knowledge of a free 
irresponsible sort; since I remember few either of 
the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely 
graceless state. I recognise at the same time that 
it was perhaps a sorry business to be so interested 
in one didn't know what. Such are, whether at 
the worst or at the best, some of the aspects of 
that season as Mr. Jenks's image presides; in the 
light of which I may perhaps again rather wonder 
at my imputation to the general picture of so much 
amenity. Clearly the good man was a civiliser — 
whacks and all; and by some art not now to be 
detected. He was a complacent classic — which 
was what my brother's claim for him, I dare say, 
mostly represented; though that passed over the 
head of my tenth year. It was a good note for 
him in this particular that, deploring the facile 
text-books of Doctor Anthon of Columbia College, 
in which there was even more crib than text, and 
holding fast to the sterner discipline of Andrews 
and Stoddard and of that other more conservative 
commentator (he too doubtless long since super- 
seded) whose name I blush to forget. I think in 
fine of Richard Pulling' s small but sincere academy 
as a consistent little protest against its big and 
easy and quite out-distancing rival, the Columbia 
College school, apparently in those days quite the 
favourite of fortune. 



XVI 

I MUST in some degree have felt it a charm 
there that we were not, under his rule, inor- 
dinately prepared for "business," but were 
on the contrary to remember that the taste of 
Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather stale 
though it may have been, had lacked the black 
bitterness marking our next ordeal and that I con- 
ceive to have proceeded from some rank predomi- 
nance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. 
It had consorted with this that we found ourselves, 
by I know not what inconsequence, a pair of the 
"assets" of a firm; Messrs. Forest and Quacken- 
boss, who carried on business at the northwest 
corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, 
having for the winter of 1854-5 taken our edu- 
cation in hand. As their establishment had the 
style, so I was conscious at the time of its having 
the general stamp and sense, of a shop — a shop 
of long standing, of numerous clients, of Hvely 
bustle and traffic. The structure itself was to 
my recent recognition still there and more than 
ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, 
but dealing in other wares than those anciently 
and as I suppose then quite freshly purveyed; so 

211 



212 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

far at least as freshness was imputable to the se- 
nior member of the firm, who had come down to 
our generation from a legendary past and with a 
striking resemblance of head and general air to 
Benjamin Franklin. Mr. Forest, under whose 
more particular attention I languished, had lasted 
on from a plainer age and, having formed, by the 
legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of 
our New York uncles — though for what it could 
have been goodness only knew — was still of a 
trempe to whack in the fine old way at their 
nephews and sons. I see him aloft, benevolent 
and hard, mildly massive, in a black dress coat 
and trousers and a white neckcloth that should 
have figured, if it didn't, a frill, and on the highest 
rostrum of our experience, whence he comes back 
to me as the dryest of all our founts of knowledge, 
though quite again as a link with far-off manners 
and forms and as the most "historic" figure we 
had ever had to do with. W. J., as I distinguish, 
had in truth scarcely to do with him — W. J. lost 
again on upper floors, in higher classes, in real 
pursuits, and connecting me, in an indirect and 
almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, 
glossy, an anointed and bearded, Mr. Quacken- 
boss, the junior partner, who conducted the classi- 
cal department and never whacked — only sent 
down his subjects, with every confidence, to his 
friend. I make out with clearness that Mr. Forest 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 213 

was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by 
the same stroke, we didn't, under his sway, go in 
terror, only went exceedingly in want; even if in 
want indeed of I scarce (for myself) know what, 
since it might well have been enough for me, in so 
resounding an air, to escape with nothing worse 
than a failure of thrill. If I didn't feel that in- 
terest I must clearly not have inspired it, and I 
marvel afresh, under these memories, at the few 
points at which I appear to have touched con- 
stituted reality. That, however, is a different con- 
nection altogether, and I read back into the one 
I have been noting much of the chill, or at least 
the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed de- 
tachment: it was during that winter that I began 
to live by anticipation in another world and to 
feel our uneasy connection with New York loosen 
beyond recovery. I remember for how many 
months, when the rupture took place, we had been 
to my particular consciousness virtually in motion; 
though I regain at the same time the impression 
of more experience on the spot than had marked 
our small previous history : this, however, a branch 
of the matter that I must for the moment brush 
aside. For it would have been meanwhile odd 
enough to hold us in arrest a moment — that 
quality of our situation that could suffer such ele- 
ments as those I have glanced at to take so con- 
siderably the place of education as more usually 



214 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and conventionally understood, and by that un- 
derstanding more earnestly mapped out; a defi- 
ciency, in the whole thing, that I fail at all consis- 
tently to deplore, however — struck as I am with 
the rare fashion after which, in any small victim 
of life, the inward perversity may work. 

It works by converting to its uses things vain 
and unintended, to the great discomposure of their 
prepared opposites, which it by the same stroke so 
often reduces to naught; with the result indeed 
that one may most of all see it — so at least have 
I quite exclusively seen it, the little life out for its 
chance — as proceeding by the inveterate process 
of conversion. As I reconsider both my own and 
my brother's early start — even his too, made 
under stronger propulsions — it is quite for me as 
if the authors of our being and guardians of our 
youth had virtually said to us but one thing, 
directed our course but by one word, though 
constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! 
With which I have not even the sense of any 
needed appeal in us for further apprehension of 
the particular precious metal our chemistry was to 
have in view. I taste again in that pure air no 
ghost of a hint, for instance, that the precious 
metal was the refined gold of "success" — a re- 
ward of effort for which I remember to have heard 
at home no good word, nor any sort of word, ever 
faintly breathed. It was a case of the presump- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 215 

tion that we should hear words enough abundantly 
elsewhere; so that any dignity the idea might 
claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, 
and in the second might well be overstated. We 
were to convert and convert, success — in the 
sense that was in the general air — or no success; 
and simply everything that should happen to us, 
every contact, every impression and every ex- 
perience we should know, were to form our solu- 
ble stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we 
remain unaware, by the time our perceptions were 
decently developed, of the substance finally pro- 
jected and most desirable. That substance might 
be just consummately Virtue, as a social grace and 
value — and as a matter furthermore on which 
pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure 
were as little as possible called upon to flourish. 
This last luxury therefore quite failed us, and we 
understood no whit the less what was suggested 
and expected because of the highly Hberal way in 
which the pill, if I may call it so, was gilded: it 
had been made up — to emphasise my image — 
in so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of 
charity and humour. What I speak of is the 
medium itself, of course, that we were most imme- 
diately steeped in — I am glancing now at no par- 
ticular turn of our young attitude in it, and I can 
scarce suflSciently express how little it could have 
conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's 



216 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

prime horror was of them — he only cared for vir- 
tue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and 
nothing could have been of a happier whimsi- 
cality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk 
and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the 
human and the livehest reaction from the literal. 
The literal played in our education as small a part 
as it perhaps ever played in any, and we whole- 
somely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank 
contradictions. The presence of paradox was so 
bright among us — though fluttering ever with 
as light a wing and as short a flight as need have 
been — that we fairly grew used to allow, from an 
early time, for the so many and odd declarations 
we heard launched, to the extent of happily "dis- 
counting" them; the moral of all of which was 
that we need never fear not to be good enough if 
we were only social enough: a splendid meaning 
indeed being attached to the latter term. 

Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can 
really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or 
moralism, as it was more invidiously worded, made 
hay of in the very interest of character and con- 
duct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by 
their association with the conscience — that is the 
conscious conscience — the very home of the literal, 
the haunt of so many pedantries. Pedantries, on 
all this ground, were anathema; and if our dear 
parent had at all minded his not being consistent. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 217 

and had entertained about us generally less pas- 
sionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous 
state in him moreover,) he might have found it 
difficult to apply to the promotion of our studies 
so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of Method. 
Method certainly never quite raged among us ; but 
it was our fortune nevertheless that everything 
had its turn, and that such indifferences were no 
more pedantic than certain rigours might perhaps 
have been; of all of which odd notes of our situa- 
tion there would, and possibly will, be more to 
say — my present aim is really but to testify to 
what most comes up for me to-day in the queer 
educative air I have been trying to breathe again. 
That definite reflection is that if we had not had in 
us to some degree the root of the matter no method, 
however confessedly or aggressively "pedantic," 
would much have availed for us; and that since 
we apparently did have it, deep down and inert 
in our small patches of virgin soil, the fashion after 
which it struggled forth was an experience as 
intense as any other and a record of as great a 
dignity. It may be asked me, I recognise, of the 
root of "what" matter I so complacently speak, 
and if I say "Why, of the matter of our having 
with considerable intensity proved educable, or, if 
you like better, teachable, that is accessible to 
experience," it may again be retorted: "That 
won't do for a decent account of a young con- 



218 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

sciousness ; for think of all the things that the fail- 
ure of method, of which you make so light, didn't 
put into yours; think of the splendid economy of 
a real — or at least of a planned and attempted 
education, a * regular course of instruction ' — and 
then think of the waste involved in the so inferior 
substitute of which the pair of you were evidently 
victims." An admonition this on which I brood, 
less, however, than on the still other sense, rising 
from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, 
of my having mastered the particular history of just 
that waste — to the point of its actually affecting 
me as blooming with interest, to the point even of 
its making me ask myself how in the world, if the 
question is of the injection of more things into 
the consciousness (as would seem the case,) mine 
could have "done" with more: thanks to its small 
trick, perhaps vicious I admit, of having felt itself 
from an early time almost uncomfortably stuffed. 
I see my critic, by whom I mean my representa- 
tive of method at any price, take in this plea only 
to crush it with his confidence — that without the 
signal effects of method one must have had by an 
inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, 
and can therefore only have been an artful dodger 
more or less successfully dodging. I take full ac- 
count of the respectability of the prejudice against 
one or two of the uses to which the intelligence 
may at a pinch be put — the criminal use in par- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 219 

ticular of falsifying its history, of forging its records 
even, and of appearing greater than the traceable 
grounds warrant. One can but fall back, none the 
less, on the particular ?^?2traceability of grounds 
— when it comes to that: cases abound so in 
which, with the grounds all there, the intelHgence 
itseK is not to be identified. I contend for noth- 
ing moreover but the hvely interest of the view, 
and above all of the measure, of almost any men- 
tal history after the fact. Of less interest, com- 
paratively, is that sight of the mind before — be- 
fore the demonstration of the fact, that is, and 
while still muffled in theories and presumptions 
(purple and fine linen, and as such highly becom- 
ing though these be) of what shall prove best for 
it. 

Which doubtless too numerous remarks have 
been determined by my sense of the tenuity of 
some of my clues: I had begun to count our 
wavering steps from so very far back, and with a 
lively disposition, I confess, not to miss even the 
vaguest of them. I can scarce indeed overstate the 
vagueness that quite had to attend a great number 
in presence of the fact that our father, caring for 
our spiritual decency unspeakably more than for 
anything else, anything at all that might be or 
might become ours, would have seemed to regard 
this cultivation of it as profession and career 
enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest 



220 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

in our mastery of any art or craft. It was not 
certainly that the profession of virtue would have 
been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that, 
singular though the circumstance, there were times 
when he might have struck us as having after all 
more patience with it than with this, that or 
the other more technical thrifty scheme. Of the 
beauty of his dissimulated anxiety and tenderness 
on these and various other suchlike heads, how- 
ever, other examples will arise; for I see him now 
as fairly afraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly 
declining to dabble in the harshness of practical 
precautions or impositions. The effect of his atti- 
tude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly 
providential, but in spite of this so socially and 
affectionally founded, could only be to make life 
interesting to us at the worst, in default of making 
it extraordinarily "paying." He had a theory that 
it would somehow or other always be paying 
enough — and this much less by any poor concep- 
tion of our wants (for he delighted in our wants 
and so sympathetically and sketchily and sum- 
marily wanted /or us) than by a happy and friendly, 
though slightly nebulous, conception of our re- 
sources. Delighting ever in the truth while gen- 
erously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we 
might make the difference — the facts having a 
way of being many and the truth remaining but 
one — he held that there would always be enough ; 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 221 

since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and 
dreadful, and we didn't and wouldn't depart from 
it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he wouldn't have 
had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it 
for due abundance even of meat and drink and 
raiment, even of wisdom and wit and honour. It 
is too much to say that our so preponderantly 
humanised and sociahsed adolescence was to make 
us look out for these things with a subtle indirect- 
ness ; but I return to my proposition that there may 
still be a charm in seeing such hazards at work 
through a given, even if not in a systematised, case. 
My cases are of course given, so that economy of 
observation after the fact, as I have called it, be- 
comes inspiring, not less than the amusement, or 
whatever it may be, of the question of what might 
happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to 
several very towny and domesticated Httle per- 
sons, who were confirmed in their towniness and 
fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of be- 
ing chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy 
uplands under the she-wolf of competition and 
discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the 
experiment — which was really, as I have hinted, 
no plotted thing at all, but only an accident of 
accidents — proceeded just from the fact that the 
small subjects, a defeated Romulus, a prematurely 
sacrificed Remus, had in their very sensibility an 
asset, as we have come to say, a principle of life 



222 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and even of *'fun." Perhaps on the other hand 
the success would have been greater with less of 
that particular complication or facilitation and 
more of some other which I shall be at a loss to 
identify. What I find in my path happens to be 
the fact of the sensibility, and from the light it 
sheds the curious, as also the common, things 
that did from occasion to occasion play into it 
seem each to borrow a separate and vivifying glow. 
As at the Institution Vergnes and at Mr. PulK 
ing Jenks's, however this might be, so at "For- 
est's," or in other words at the more numerous 
establishment of Messrs. Forest and Quackenboss, 
where we spent the winter of 1854, reality, in the 
form of multitudinous mates, was to have swarmed 
about me increasingly: at Forest's the prolonged 
roll-call in the morning, as I sit in the vast bright 
crowded smelly smoky room, in which rusty black 
stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture, 
bristles with names. Hoes and Havemeyers, 
Stokeses, Phelpses, Colgates and others, of a subse- 
quently great New York salience. It was socia- 
ble and gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was 
then, by an inch or two, a bigger boy — though 
with crushing superiorities in that line all round; 
and when I wonder why the scene was sterile 
(which was what I took it for at ,the worst) the 
reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of 
arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 223 

all the air. The quantity imposed may not in 
fact have been positively gross, yet it is what I 
most definitely remember — not, I mean, that I 
have retained the dimmest notion of the science, 
but only of the dire image of our being in one way 
or another always supposedly addressed to it. I 
recall strange neighbours and deskfellows who, 
not otherwise too objectionable, were uncanny and 
monstrous through their possession, cultivation, 
imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall 
pages of figures, interspaces streaked with oblique 
ruled lines that weirdly "balanced," whatever that 
might mean, and other like horrors. Nothing in 
truth is more distinct to me than the tune to 
which they were, without exception, at their ease 
on such ground — unless it be my general dazzled, 
humiliated sense, through those years, of the com- 
mon, the baffling, mastery, all round me, of a 
hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did 
things and had things — everyone knew how, even 
when it was a question of the small animals, the 
dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food 
and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just 
as they kept in their heads such secrets for how to 
do sums — those secrets that I must even then 
have foreseen I should even so late in life as this 
have failed to discover. I may have known things, 
have by that time learnt a few, myself, but I 
didn't know that — what I did know; whereas 



224 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

those who surrounded me were all agog, to my 
vision, with the benefit of their knowledge. I see 
them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin 
and grimace with it; and the presumable vul- 
garity of some of them, certain scattered shades 
of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but 
one of the appearances of an abounding play of 
genius. Who was it I ever thought stupid? — 
even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sun- 
dry expressions of life or force, which I yet had 
no name for, represented somehow art without 
grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same 
thing) presence without type. All of which, I 
should add, didn't in the least prevent my mov- 
ing on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as 
I have noted, the general blank of consciousness, 
in the conditions of that winter, rather tended to 
spread, this could perhaps have but had for its 
best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. 
They were too much of the same kind; the result, 
that is, of everyone's seeming to know everything 
— to the effect, a little, that everything suffered 
by it. There was a boy called Simpson my juxta- 
position to whom I recall as uninterruptedly close, 
and whose origin can only have been, I think, 
quite immediately Irish — and Simpson, I feel 
sure, was a friendly and helpful character. Yet 
even he reeked, to my sense, with strange accom- 
plishment — no single show of which but was 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 225 

accompanied in him by a smart protrusion of the 
lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that 
almost crushed me to sadness. It is as if I had 
passed in that sadness most of those ostensibly 
animated months; an effect however doubtless 
in some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, 
from the more intelligible nearness of the time 

— it had brought me to the end of my twelfth 
year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. 
How I gave to that state, in any case, such an air 
of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my 
instructors — which I infer I did from their so 
intensely letting me alone — I am quite at a loss 
to say; I have in truth mainly the remembrance 
of being consistently either ignored or exquisitely 
considered (I know not which to call it;) even if 
without the belief, which would explain it, that 
I passed for generally "wanting" any more than 
for naturally odious. It was strange, at all events 

— it could only have been — to be so stupid with- 
out being more brutish and so perceptive without 
being more keen. Here were a case and a prob- 
lem to which no honest master with other and 
better cases could have felt justified in giving 
time; he would have had at least to be morbidly 
curious, and I recall from that sphere of rule no 
instance whatever of the least refinement of in- 
quiry. I should even probably have missed one 
of these more flattering shades of attention had 



226 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

I missed attention at all; but I think I was never 
really aware of how little I got or how much I did 
without. I read back into the whole connection 
indeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a 
foreseen and foredoomed detachment: I have noted 
how at this desperate juncture the mild forces 
making for our conscious relief, pushing the door 
to Europe definitely open, began at last to be 
effective. Nothing seemed to matter at all but 
that I should become personally and incredibly 
acquainted with Piccadilly and Richmond Park 
and Ham Common. I regain at the same time 
the impression of more experience on the spot than 
had marked our small previous history. 

Pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere 
little fact that a small court for recreation was at- 
tached to our academy added something of a grace 
to life. We descended in relays, for "intermis- 
sion," into a paved and walled yard of the scantest 
size; the only provision for any such privilege — 
not counting the street itself, of which, at the 
worst of other conditions, we must have had free 
range — that I recover from those years. The 
ground is built over now, but I could still figure, 
on a recent occasion, our small breathing-space; 
together with my then abject little sense that it 
richly sufficed — or rather, positively, that noth- 
ing could have been more romantic. For within 
our limit we freely conversed, and at nothing did 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 227 

I assist with more interest than at free conversa- 
tion. Certain boys hover before me, the biggest, 
the fairest, the most worthy of freedom, dominat- 
ing the scene and scattering upon fifty subjects 
the most surprising Hghts. One of these heroes, 
whose stature and complexion are still there for 
me to admire, did tricks of legerdemain, with the 
scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a pocket- 
knife — as to some one of which it is as fresh as 
yesterday that I ingenuously invited him to show 
me how to do it, and then, on his treating me 
with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solic- 
itation. Fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly 
fresh for me at this hour, is the cutting remark 
thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't 
Simpson and whose identity is lost for me in his 
mere inspired authority: "Oh, oh, oh, I should 
think you'd be too proud — ! " I had neither been 
too proud nor so much as conceived that one 
might be, but I remember well how it flashed on 
me with this that I had failed thereby of a 
high luxury or privilege — which the whole future, 
however, might help me to make up for. To 
what extent it has helped is another matter, but 
so fine was the force of the suggestion that I think 
I have never in all the years made certain returns 
upon my spirit without again feeling the pang 
from the cool little voice of the Fourteenth Street 
yard. Such was the moral exercise it at least 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

allowed us room for. It also allowed us room, to 
be just, for an inordinate consumption of hot 
waffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" 
who presided, with her husband's aid as I remem- 
ber, at a portable stove set up in a passage or recess 
opening from the court; to which we flocked and 
pushed, in a merciless squeeze, with all our cop- 
pers, and the products of which, the oblong 
farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, 
stamped and smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but 
softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed upon it for 
a finish, revealed to me I for a long time, even 
for a very long time supposed, the highest pleasure 
of sense. We stamped about, we freely conversed, 
we ate sticky waffles by the hundred — I recall 
no worse acts of violence unless I count as such 
our intermissional rushes to Pynsent's of the Ave- 
nue, a few doors off, in the particular interest of a 
confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase 
is, for popularity, while even surpassing it for 
stickiness. Pynsent's was higher up in the row 
in which Forest's had its front — other and dearer 
names have dropped from me, but Pynsent's ad- 
heres with all the force of the strong saccharine 
principle. This principle, at its highest, we con- 
ceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured 
mounds of chopped cocoanut or whatever other 
substance, if a finer there be; profusely, lusciously 
endued and distributed on small tin trays in the 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 229 

manner of haycocks in a field. We acquired, we 
appropriated, we transported, we enjoyed them, 
they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highest 
enjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets 
— and I speak of those other than financial, with 
an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any, or 
at every, personal point, that I lose myself in the 
thought of. 



XVII 

I LOSE myself, of a truth, under the whole 
pressure of the spring of memory proceeding 
from recent revisitings and recognitions — the 
action of the fact that time until lately had spared 
hereabouts, and may still be sparing, in the most 
exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the 
rarest in New York, a whole cluster of landmarks, 
leaving me to "spot" and verify, right and left, 
the smallest preserved particulars. These things, 
at the pressure, flush together again, interweave 
their pattern and quite thrust it at me, the absurd 
little fusion of images, for a history or a picture of 
the time — the background of which I see after 
all so much less as the harsh Sixth Avenue corner 
than as many other matters. Those scant shades 
claimed us but briefly and superficially, and it 
comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light 
of autumn afternoons, our associates, the most 
animated or at any rate the best "put in" little 
figures of our landscape, were not our compara- 
tively obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to 
have swum out of our ken between any day and 
its morrow. Our other companions, those we 

practically knew "at home," ignored our school, 

230 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 231 

having better or worse of their own, but peopled 
somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring 
there for me in documentary vividness, bristles 
with Van Burens, Van Winkles, De Peysters, Cos- 
ters, Senters, Norcoms, Robinsons (these last 
composing round a stone-throwing "Eugene,") 
Wards, Hunts and tuUi quanti — to whose ranks 
I must add our invariable Albert, before-men- 
tioned, and who swarm from up and down and 
east and west, appearing to me surely to have 
formed a rich and various society. Our salon, 
it is true, was mainly the street, loose and rude and 
crude in those days at best — though with a rapid 
increase of redeeming features, to the extent to 
which the spread of micaceous brown stone could 
redeem: as exhibited especially in the ample face 
of the Scotch Presbyterian church promptly ris- 
ing just opposite our own peculiar row and which 
it now marks for me somewhat grimly a span of 
life to have seen laboriously rear itself, contin- 
uously flourish and utterly disappear. While in 
construction it was only less interesting than the 
dancing-academy of Mr. Edward Ferrero, slightly 
west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic 
stage, a large and delightfully dangerous adjunct 
to our playground, though with the distinction of 
coming much to surpass it for interest in the final 
phase. While we clambered about on ladders 
and toyed with the peril of unfloored abysses, while 



232 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

we trespassed and pried and pervaded, snatching 
a scant impression from sorry material enough, 
clearly, the sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond 
that of the profane; but when both were finished 
and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle 
more freely, it need scarce be said, than to that 
of the psalm. *Treely" indeed, in our particular 
case, scarce expresses the latter relation; since 
our young liberty in respect to church-going was 
absolute and we might range at will, through the 
great city, from one place of worship and one form 
of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore 
them all equally, which was what we mainly did; 
whereas we rallied without a break to the halls of 
Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as I supposed 
dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, 
the high amenity, the general aesthetic and social 
appeal, of which still hangs in its wealth before 
me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, 
strange long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy 
chin, squirming and swaying and cushion-thump- 
ing in his only a shade more chastely adorned tem- 
ple, is distinct enough too — just as we enjoyed this 
bleak intensity the more, to my personal vision, 
through the vague legend (and no legend was 
too vague for me to cherish) of his being the next 
pastor in succession to the one under whom our 
mother, thereto predirected by our good great- 
grandfather, Alexander Robertson already named, 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 233 

who was nothing if not Scotch and Presbyterian 
and authoritative, as his brave old portrait by the 
elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her mar- 
riage; the marriage so lamentedly diverting her 
indeed from this tradition that, to mark the rue- 
ful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the 
aid of India muslin and a wondrous gold head- 
band, in the maternal, the Washington Square 
"parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration 
of the then Mayor of the city — I think Mr. Varick. 
We progeny were of course after this mild con- 
vulsion not at all in the fold; yet it strikes me as 
the happy note of a simple age that we were prac- 
tically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might 
have chosen to enter: since, going forth hand in 
hand into the sunshine (and I connect myself here 
with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, 
whose orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in 
modern phrase, as small unprejudiced inquirers 
obeying their inspiration, any resort of any con- 
gregation detected by us; doing so, I make out 
moreover, with a sense of earnest provision for 
any contemporary challenge. "What church do 
you go to?" — the challenge took in childish cir- 
cles that searching form; of the form it took 
among our elders my impression is more vague. 
To which I must add as well that our "fending" 
in this fashion for ourselves didn't so prepare us 
for invidious remark — remark I mean upon our 



234 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, 
much the same discredit that a houseless or a cook- 
less would have done — as to hush in my breast 
the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruc- 
tion (of which we had plenty, and of the most 
charming and familiar) but simply for instruction 
(a very different thing) as to where we should say 
we "went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or 
derisive comment. It was colder than any criti- 
cism, I recall, to hear our father reply that we 
could plead nothing less than the whole privilege 
of Christendom and that there was no communion, 
even that of the Catholics, even that of the Jews, 
even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we 
need find ourselves excluded. With the freedom 
we enjoyed our dilemma clearly amused him: it 
would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be 
theologically more en regie. How as mere de- 
tached unaccompanied infants we enjoyed such 
impunity of range and confidence of welcome is 
beyond comprehension save by the light of the old 
manners and conditions, the old local bonhomie, 
the comparatively primal innocence, the absence 
of complications; with the several notes of which 
last beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It 
was the theory of the time and place that the 
young, were they but young enough, could take 
publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, 
and touchingly enough, all the difference of the 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 235 

old importances. It wasn't doubtless that the 
social, or call it simply the human, position of 
the child was higher than to-day — a circumstance 
not conceivable; it was simply that other digni- 
ties and values and claims, other social and hu- 
man positions, were less definite and settled, less 
prescriptive and absolute. A rich sophistication 
is after all a gradual growth, and it would have 
been sophisticated to fear for us, before such 
bright and vacant vistas, the perils of the way or 
to see us received anywhere even with the irony 
of patronage. We hadn't in fact seats of honour, 
but that justice was done us — that is that we 
were placed to our advantage — I infer from my 
having hked so to *'go," even though my grounds 
may have been but the love of the exhibition in 
general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, 
sounds, smells and colours became for me, wher- 
ever enjoyed, and enjoyed most where most col- 
lected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot 
of the mind. Let me at the same time make the 
point that — such may be the snobbery of ex- 
treme youth — I not only failed quite to rise to the 
parental reasoning, but made out in it rather a 
certain sophistry; such a prevarication for in- 
stance as if we had habitually said we kept the 
carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it be- 
cause we sent when we wanted one to University 
Place, where Mr. Hathorn had his livery-stable: 



236 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

a connection, this last, promoted by my father's 
frequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks 
were limited through an injury received in youth) 
and promoting in turn and at a touch, to my con- 
sciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remem- 
bered things. I recall the adventure, no infre- 
quent one, of being despatched to Mr. Hathorn 
to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and 
odour, the genial warmth, at a fine steaming Irish 
pitch, of the stables and their stamping and 
backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their 
chairs tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, 
a pair of which latter seek the floor again, at my 
appeal, as those of big bearded Mr. Hathorn him- 
self: an impression enriched by the drive home in 
lolling and bumping possession of the great vehicle 
and associated further with Sunday afternoons in 
spring, with the question of distant Harlem and 
remoter Bloomingdale, with the experience at one 
of these junctures of far-away Hoboken, if it 
wasn't Williamsburg, which fits in fancifully some- 
where; when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry 
and the ferry by something, something to my pres- 
ent vision very dim and dusty and archaic, some- 
thing quite ragged and graceless, in the nature of 
a public tea-garden and ices. The finest link here, 
however, is, for some reason, with the New York 
Hotel, and thereby with Albany uncles; thereby 
also with Mr. Hathorn in person waiting and wait- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 237 

ing expensively on his box before the house and 
somehow felt as attuned to Albany uncles even as 
Mrs. Cannon had subtly struck me as being. 

Intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is 
my vision of the halls of Ferrero — where the orgy 
of the senses and even the riot of the mind, of 
which I have just spoken, must quite literally have 
led me more of a dance than anywhere. Let this 
sketch of a lost order note withal that under so 
scant a general provision for infant exercise, as 
distinguished from infant ease, our hopping and 
sliding in tune had to be deemed urgent. It was 
the sense for this form of relief that clearly was 
general, superseding as the ampler Ferrero scene 
did previous limited exhibitions; even those, for 
that matter, coming back to me in the ancient per- 
son of M. Charriau — I guess at the writing of his 
name — whom I work in but confusedly as a pro- 
fessional visitor, a subject gaped at across a gulf 
of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more 
that I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a 
difference or two, the portraits of the aged Vol- 
taire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and jarret 
tenduy incited the young agility of our mother 
and aunt. Edward Ferrero was another matter; 
in the prime of Hfe, good-looking, romantic and 
moustachioed, he was suddenly to figure, on the 
outbreak of the Civil War, as a General of volun- 
teers — very much as if he had been one of Bona- 



238 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

parte's improvised young marshals; in anticipa- 
tion of which, however, he wasn't at all fierce or 
superior, to my remembrance, but most kind to 
sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world 
fashion and as if we wanted but a touch to become 
also men of the world. Remarkably good-looking, 
as I say, by the measure of that period, and extraor- 
dinarily agile — he could so gracefully leap and 
bound that his bounding into the military saddle, 
such occasion offering, had all the felicity, and 
only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus — 
he was still more admired by the mothers, with 
whom he had to my eyes a most elegant relation, 
than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the 
frequent and delightful soirees, he caused trays 
laden with lucent syrups repeatedly to circulate. 
The scale of these entertainments, as I figured it, 
and the florid frescoes, just damp though they 
were with newness, and the free lemonade, and 
the freedom of remark, equally great, with the 
mothers, were the lavish note in him — just as 
the fact that he never himself fiddled, but was 
followed, over the shining parquet, by attendant 
fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less 
on his later dignity, so far as that dignity was 
compassed. Dignity marked in full measure even 
at the time the presence of his sister Madame 
Dubreuil, a handsome authoritative person who 
instructed us equally, in fact preponderantly, and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 239 

who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so 
engaged, physiognomically, my wondering inter- 
est, that I hear to this hour her shrill Franco- 
American accent: "Don't look at me, little boy 
— look at my feet." I see them now, these some- 
what fat members, beneath the uplifted skirt, 
encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels but 
attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white 
stockings, to her sohd ankles — an emphatic sign 
of the time; not less than I recover my surprised 
sense of their supporting her without loss of bal- 
ance, substantial as she was, in the "first position"; 
her command of which, her ankles clapped close 
together and her body very erect, was so perfect 
that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turn- 
ing the corner backward, she never fell prone on 
her face. 

It consorted somehow with this wealth of re- 
source in her that she appeared at the soirees, or 
at least at the great fancy-dress soiree in which 
the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade 
and all, is doubtless really shut up, as the "genius 
of California," a dazzling vision of white satin and 
golden flounces — her brother meanwhile main- 
taining that more distinctively European colour 
which I feel to have been for my young presump- 
tion the convincing essence of the scene in the 
character of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, 
highly consonant with his type. There hovered 



240 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

in the background a flushed, full-chested and 
tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a 
singer of the heavy order, at the Opera, carried us 
off into larger things still — the Opera having at 
last about then, after dwelling for years, down 
town, in shifty tents and tabernacles, set up its 
own spacious pavilion and reared its head as the 
Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served 
for the end, of our very street, where, though it 
wasn't exactly near and Union Square bristled be- 
tween, I could yet occasionally gape at the great 
bills beside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil 
always so serviceably came in at the bottom of 
the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" 
at the best, I beheve, and presently to become, 
on that scene, slightly ragged I fear even in its 
freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say 
nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my 
imagination, the richer, the "European" value; 
especially for instance when our air thrilled, in 
the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, 
with the visit of the great Grisi and the great 
Mario, and I seemed, though the art of advertise- 
ment was then comparatively so young and so 
chaste, to see our personal acquaintance, as he 
could almost be called, thickly sandwiched be- 
tween them. Such was one's strange sense for 
the connections of things that they drew out the 
halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly to re- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 241 

sound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if open- 
ing straight upon the stage, and Europe, by the 
stroke, had come to us in such force that we had 
but to enjoy it on the spot. That could never 
have been more the case than on the occasion of 
my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball — not at 
the operatic Academy, but at the dancing-school, 
which came so nearly to the same thing — the 
dress of a debardeur, whatever that might be, 
which carried in its puckered folds of dark green 
reHeved with scarlet and silver such an exotic 
fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend. 
The legend had come round to us, it was true, by 
way of Albany, whence we learned at the moment 
of our need, that one of the adventures, one of the 
least lamentable, of our cousin Johnny had been 
his figuring as a debardeur at some Parisian revel; 
the elegant evidence of which, neatly packed, 
though with but vague instructions for use, was 
helpfully sent on to us. The instructions for use 
were in fact so vague that I was afterward to be- 
come a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly dis- 
honoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. I 
fell, that is I stood, short of my proper form by no 
less than half a leg; the essence of the debardeur 
being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in 
white silk stockings and with neat calves, from the 
beribboned breeches which I artlessly suffered to 
flap at my ankles. The discovery, after the fact. 



242 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

was disconcerting — yet had been best made with- 
al, too late; for it would have seemed, I conceive, 
a less monstrous act to attempt to lengthen my 
legs than to shorten Johnny's culotte. The trouble 
had been that we hadn't really known what a de- 
bardeur was, and I am not sure indeed that I know 
to this day. It had been more fatal still that even 
fond Albany couldn't tell us. 



XVIII 

I HAVE nevertheless the memory of a restless 
relish of all that time — by which I mean of 
those final months of New York, even with 
so scant a record of other positive successes to 
console me. I had but one success, always — that 
of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring: I was 
sunk in that luxury, which had never yet been 
so great, and it might well make up for anything. 
It made up perfectly, and more particularly as the 
stopgap as w^hich I have already defined it, for 
the scantness of the period immediately round us; 
since how could I have wanted richer when the 
limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed 
ever to recede and recede? It is true that but 
the other day, on the scene revisited, I was to be 
struck rather as by their weird immobility: there 
on the north side, still untenanted after sixty 
years, a tremendous span in the life of New York, 
was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a 
friendly goat or two used to browse, whom we fed 
perversely with scraps of paper, just as perversely 
appeciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden 
palings. There hovers for me an impression of 
the glass roofs of a florist, a suffered squatter for 

243 



244 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

a while; but florists and goats have aHke disap- 
peared and the barrenness of the place is as sor- 
did as only untended gaps in great cities can seem. 
One of its boundaries, however, still breathes asso- 
ciations — the home of the Wards, the more east- 
ward of a pair of houses then and still isolated has 
remained the same through all vicissitudes, only 
now quite shabbily mellow and, like everything 
else, much smaller than one had remembered it; 
yet this too without prejudice to the large, the 
lustrous part played in our prospect by that inter- 
esting family. I saddle their mild memory a bit 
"subjectively" perhaps with the burden of that 
character — making out that they were interesting 
really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly 
as M. Jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing 
their wild savour as they did to that New England 
stamp which we took to be strong upon them and 
no other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. 
It made them different, made them, in their 
homely grace, rather aridly romantic: I pored in 
those days over the freshness of the Franconia 
Stories of the brothers Abbott, then immediately 
sequent to the sweet RoUo series and even more 
admired; and there hung about the Wards, to my 
sense, that atmosphere of apples and nuts and 
cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls," of 
domestic Bible-reading and attendance at "even- 
ing lecture," of the fear of parental discipline and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 245 

the cultivated art of dodging it, combined with 
great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost 
envied liability to warts on hard brown hands, a 
familiarity with garments domestically wrought, a 
brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented 
the annexation of whole tracts of town life unex- 
plored by ourselves and achieved by the brothers 
since their relatively recent migration from Con- 
necticut — which State in general, with the city 
of Hartford in particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, 
rivery background, the very essence of Indian 
summer, in the rear of their discourse. Three in 
number, Johnny and Charley and Freddy, with 
castigating elders, even to the second and third 
generation back, dimly discerned through closed 
window-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls 
of Ferrero — it was a part of their homely grace 
and their social tone, if not of their want of the 
latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question 
for them; on the other hand they frequented, 
Charley and Freddy at least, the Free School, 
which was round in Thirteenth Street — Johnny, 
the eldest, having entered the Free Academy, an 
institution that loomed large to us and that I see 
as towered or castellated or otherwise impressively 
embellished in vague vignettes, in stray represen- 
tations, perhaps only of the grey schoolbook order, 
which are yet associated for me with those fond 
images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted," decorat- 



246 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

ing at either end the interior of the old onini- 
busses. We must have been in relation with no 
other feeders at the public trough of learning — I 
can't account otherwise for the glamour as of 
envied privilege and strange experience that sur- 
rounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great 
sharpening of the edge of their wit, in the wild life 
of the people, beside which the life at Mr. Pulling 
Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnes was 
colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were 
of the people, and still were full of family forms 
— which seemed, one dimly made out through the 
false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger 
and clearer note of New England; the note that 
had already determined a shy yearning under pe- 
rusal of the Rollo and Franconia chronicles. The 
special mark of these friends was perhaps however 
that of being socially young while they were an- 
nually old; little Freddy in particular, very short, 
very inured and very popular, though less curi- 
ously wrinkled about eyes and mouth than Char- 
ley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even while 
crouching or hopping, even while racing or roar- 
ing, as a high superiority in the games of the street 
prescribed. It was to strike me later on, when 
reading or hearing of young Americans of those 
parts who had turned "hard" or reckless by reac- 
tion from excessive discipline, theologic and eco- 
nomic, and had gone to sea or to California or to 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 247 

the *'bad," that Freddy and Charley were typical 
of the race, even if their fortunes had taken, as I 
hoped, a happier form. That, I said to myself 
for the interest of it, that, the stuff of the Wards, 
their homely grace, was all New England — so 
far at least as New England wasn't Emerson and 
Margaret Fuller and Mr. Channing and the "best 
Boston" families. Such, in small very plastic 
minds, is the intensity, if not the value, of early 
impressions. 

And yet how can such visions not have paled in 
the southern glow of the Norcoms, who had lately 
arrived en masse from Louisville and had impro- 
vised a fine old Kentucky home in the last house 
of our row — the one to be occupied so differently, 
after their strange and precipitate flight, as I dim- 
ly make out, by the Ladies of the Sacred Heart; 
those who presently, if I mistake not, moved out 
to Bloomingdale, if they were not already in part 
established there. Next us westward were the 
Ogdens, three slim and fair sisters, who soared far 
above us in age and general amenity; then came 
the Van Winkles, two sisters, I think, and a brother 
— he much the most serious and judicious, as well 
as the most educated, of our friends ; and so at last 
the Norcoms, during their brief but concentrated, 
most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as I re- 
call it, of a couple of breathless winters. We were 
provided by their presence with as happy a foil 



248 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

as we could have wished to the plainness and 
dryness of the Wards; their homely grace was all 
their own and was also embodied in three brothers, 
Eugene, Reginald, Albert, whose ages would have 
corresponded, I surmise, with those of Johnny, 
Charley and Freddy if these latter hadn't, in their 
way, as I have hinted, defied any close notation. 
Elder sons — there were to my recollection no 
daughters — moved too as with their heads in 
the clouds; notably "Stiffy," eldest of all, whom 
we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as sublime 
and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied 
the term in use among us before we had acquired 
for reference to such types the notion of the nuance^ 
the dandy, the dude, the masher. (Divided I 
was, I recall, between the dread and the glory of 
being so greeted, *' Well, Stiffy — !" as a penalty of 
the least attempt at personal adornment.) The 
higher intensity for our sense of the Norcoms came 
from the large, the lavish, ease of their hospitality; 
whereas our intercourse with the Wards was 
mainly in the street or at most the "yard" — and 
it was a wonder how intimacy could to that degree 
consort with publicity. A glazed southern gal- 
lery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and 
to the rake of which their innermost penetralia 
seemed ever to stand open, encompasses my other 
memories. Everything took place on the poo'ch, 
including the free, quite the profuse, consumption 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 249 

of hot cakes and molasses, including even the 
domestic manufacture of sausages, testified to by 
a strange machine that was worked like a hand- 
organ and by the casual halves, when not the 
wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh from Kentucky 
stores. We must have been for a time constantly 
engaged with this delightful group, who never 
ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and yet of 
the presence of whose members under other roofs 
than their own, by a return of hospitality received, 
I retain no image. They didn't count and didn't 
grudge — the sausage-mill kept turning and the 
molasses flowing for all who came; that was the 
expression of their southern grace, especially em- 
bodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and 
chosen friend (Reggie had but crushed my fingers 
under the hinge of a closing door, the mark of 
which act of inadvertence I was to carry through 
life,) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, 
and the moral of whose queer little triangular 
brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my attach- 
ment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, 
as the error of a Kentucky diet. 

The great Kentucky error, however, had been 
the introduction into a free State of two pieces of 
precious property which our friends were to fail 
to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers 
whose presence contributed most to their exotic 
note. We revelled in the fact that Davy and Aunt 



250 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 



Sylvia (pronounced An'silvy,) a light-brown lad 
with extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, 
grave, deeper-coloured mother, not radiant as to 
anything but her vivid turban, had been born 
and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern 
and such as this intensity of their condition made 
them a joy, a joy to the curious mind, to consort 
with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he 
enriched, he adorned them with a personal, a pic- 
torial lustre that none of us could emulate, and 
servitude in the absolute thus did more for him 
socially than we had ever seen done, above stairs 
or below, for victims of its lighter forms. What 
was not our dismay therefore when we suddenly 
learnt — it must have blown right up and down 
the street — that mother and son had fled, in the 
dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage 
of their visit to the North simply to leave the 
house and not return, covering their tracks, suc- 
cessfully disappearing. They had never been for 
us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of 
their freedom; for they did brilliantly achieve it 
— they escaped, on northern soil, beyond recall 
or recovery. I think we had already then, on the 
spot, the sense of some degree of presence at the 
making of history; the question of what persons 
of colour and of their condition might or mightn't 
do was intensely in the air; this was exactly the 
season of the freshness of Mrs. Stowe's great novel. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 251 

It must have come out at the moment of our 
fondest acquaintance with our neighbours, though 
I have no recollection of hearing them remark 
upon it — any remark they made would have been 
sure to be so strong. I suspect they hadn't read 
it, as they certainly wouldn't have allowed it in 
the house; any more indeed than they had read 
or were likely ever to read any other work of 
fiction; I doubt whether the house contained a 
printed volume, unless its head had had in hand a 
law-book or so: I to some extent recover Mr. 
Norcom as a lawyer who had come north on im- 
portant, difficult business, on contentious, pre- 
carious grounds — a large bald political-looking 
man, very loose and ungirt, just as his wife was 
a desiccated, depressed lady who mystified me by 
always wearing her nightcap, a feebly-frilled but 
tightly-tied and unmistakable one, and the com- 
pass of whose maternal figure beneath a large long 
collarless cape or mantle defined imperfectly for 
me of course its connection with the further in- 
crease of Albert's little brothers and sisters, there 
being already, by my impression, two or three of 
these in the background. Had Davy and An'- 
silvy at least read Uncle Tom? — that question 
might well come up for us, with the certainty at 
any rate that they ignored him less than their 
owners were doing. These latter good people, 
who had been so fond of their humble dependents 



252 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and supposed this affection returned, were shocked 
at such ingratitude, though I remember taking 
a vague Httle inward Northern comfort in their 
inabihty, in their discreet decision, not to raise 
the hue and cry. Wasn't one even just dimly 
aware of the heavy hush that, in the glazed gallery, 
among the sausages and the johnny-cakes, had 
followed the first gasp of resentment? I think 
the honest Norcoms were in any case astonished, 
let alone being much incommoded; just as we 
were, for that matter, when the genial family 
itself, installed so at its ease, failed us with an 
effect of abruptness, simply ceased, in their multi- 
tude, to be there. I don't remember their going, 
nor any pangs of parting; I remember only know- 
ing with wonderment that they had gone, that 
obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how 
afterwards, in the light of later things, memory and 
fancy attended them, figured their history as the 
public complication grew and the great intersec- 
tional plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and 
disproportionately, that they had helped one to 
"know Southerners." The slim, the sallow, the 
straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene in particu- 
lar haunted my imagination; he had not been 
my comrade of election — he was too much my 
senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine 
fearless young fire-eater he would have become 
and, when the War had broken out, I know not 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 253 

what dark but pitying vision of him stretched 
stark after a battle. 

All of which sounds certainly like a meagre 
range — which heaven knows it was; but with a 
plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and 
the positive aesthetic reach that came to us through 
those dim resorts, quite worth making. They 
were scattered and they constituted on the part 
of such of our friends as had license to lead us up 
to them a ground of authority and glory propor- 
tioned exactly to the size of the field. This ex- 
tent was at cousin Helen's, with a large house and 
few inmates, vast and free, so that no hospitality, 
under the eaves, might have matched that offered 
us by the young Albert — if only that heir of all the 
ages had had rather more imagination. He had, 
I think, as little as was possible — which would 
have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank 
had not W. J., among us, on that spot and else- 
where, supplied this motive force in any quantity 
required. He imagined — that was the point — 
the comprehensive comedies we were to prepare 
and to act; comprehensive by the fact that each 
one of us, even to the God-fearing but surrepti- 
tiously law-breaking Wards, was in fairness to be 
enabled to figure. Not one of us but was some- 
how to be provided with a part, though I recall my 
brother as the constant comic star. The attics 
were thus in a word our respective temples of the 



254 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

drama — temples in which the stage, the green- 
room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as 
having consumed most of our margin. I remem- 
ber, that is, up and down the street — and the 
association is mainly with its far westward reaches 
— so much more preparation than performance, 
so much more conversation and costume than 
active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, 
especially doubtless on my own, so much more 
eager denudation, both of body and mind, than 
of achieved or inspired assumption. We shivered 
unclad and impatient both as to our persons and 
to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for breeches; 
we were supposed to make our dresses no less than 
to create our characters, and our material was in 
each direction apt to run short. I remember how 
far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, an- 
nouncing a "motive," producing a figure, throwing 
off into space conceptions that I could stare at 
across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so 
that my vision of him in these connections is not 
so much of his coming toward me, or toward any of 
us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb 
and with his back turned, as if to perform to some 
other and more assured public. There were in- 
deed other publics, publics downstairs, who glim- 
mer before me seated at the open folding-doors of 
ancient parlours, but all from the point of view of 
an absolute supernumerary, more or less squashed 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS ^55 

into the wing but never coming on. Who were 
the copious Hunts? — whose ample house, on the 
north side, toward Seventh Avenue, still stands, 
next or near that of the De Peysters, so that I 
perhaps confound some of the attributes of each, 
though clear as to the blond Beekman, or "Beek," 
of the latter race, not less than to the robust 
George and the stout, the very stout, Henry of the 
former, whom I see bounding before a gathered 
audience for the execution of a pas seul, clad in 
a garment of "Turkey red" fashioned by his own 
hands and giving way at the seams, to a complete 
absence of dessous, under the strain of too fine a 
figure: this too though I make out in those con- 
nections, that is in the twilight of Hunt and De 
Peyster garrets, our command of a comparative 
welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the 
surmise that Henry indeed had contours. 

I recover, further, some sense of the high places 
of the Van Winkles, but think of them as pervaded 
for us by the upper air of the proprieties, the pro- 
prieties that were so numerous, it would appear, 
when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather 
than by the crude fruits of young improvisation. 
Wonderful must it clearly have been still to feel 
amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of 
milieux and, as they used to say, of atmospheres. 
This was a word of those days — atmospheres were 
a thing to recognise and cultivate, for people 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

really wanted them, gasped for them; which was 
why they took them, on the whole, on easy terms, 
never exposing them, under an apparent flush, 
to the last analysis. Did we at any rate really 
vibrate to one social tone after another, or are 
these adventures for me now but fond imagina- 
tions? No, we vibrated — or I'll be hanged, as I 
may say, if I didn't; little as I could tell it or may 
have known it, little as anyone else may have 
known. There were shades, after all, in our demo- 
cratic order; in fact as I brood back to it I recog- 
nise oppositions the sharpest, contrasts the most 
intense. It wasn't given to us all to have a social 
tone, but the Costers surely had one and kept it 
in constant use; whereas the Wards, next door to 
them, were possessed of no approach to any, and 
indeed had the case been other, had they had such 
a consciousness, would never have employed it, 
would have put it away on a high shelf, as they 
put the last-baked pie, out of Freddy's and Char- 
ley's reach — heaven knows what they two would 
have done with it. The Van Winkles on the 
other hand were distinctly so provided, but with 
the special note that their provision was one, so 
to express it, with their educational, their infor- 
mational, call it even their professional: Mr. Van 
Winkle, if I mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, 
and the note of our own house was the absence 
of any profession, to the quickening of our gen- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 257 

eral as distinguished from our special sensibility. 
There was no Turkey red among those particular 
neighbours at all events, and if there had been it 
wouldn't have gaped at the seams. I didn't then 
know it, but I sipped at a fount of culture; in the 
sense, that is, that, our connection with the house 
being through Edgar, he knew about things — 
inordinately, as it struck me. So, for that mat- 
ter, did little public Freddy Ward; but the things 
one of them knew about differed wholly from the 
objects of knowledge of the other: all of which 
was splendid for giving one exactly a sense of 
things. It intimated more and more how many 
such there would be altogether. And part of the 
interest was that while Freddy gathered his among 
the wild wastes Edgar walked in a regular maze 
of culture. I didn't then know about culture, but 
Edgar must promptly have known. This im- 
pression was promoted by his moving in a distant, 
a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to 
me; I dimly descry him as appearing at Jenks's 
and vanishing again, as if even that hadn't been 
good enough — though I may be here at fault, 
and indeed can scarce say on what arduous heights 
I supposed him, as a day-scholar, to dwell. I 
took the unknown always easily for the magnifi- 
cent and was sure only of the limits of what I saw. 
It wasn't that the boys swarming for us at school 
were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that 



258 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

those peopling our hours of ease, as I have already 
noted, were almost inveterately so — they seemed 
to describe always, out of view, so much larger 
circles. I linger thus on Edgar by reason of its 
having somehow seemed to us that he described 
— was it at Doctor Anthon's? — the largest of 
all. If there was a bigger place than Doctor 
Anthon's it was there he would have been. I 
break down, as to the detail of the matter, in 
any push toward vaster suppositions. But let me 
cease to stir this imponderable dust. 



XIX 

I TRY at least to recover here, however, some 
closer notation of W. J.'s aspects — yet only 
with the odd effect of my either quite losing 
him or but apprehending him again at seated play 
with his pencil under the lamp. When I see him 
he is intently, though summarily, rapidly draw- 
ing, his head critically balanced and his eyebrows 
working, and when I don't see him it is because 
I have resignedly relinquished him. I can't have 
been often for him a deprecated, still less an ac- 
tively rebuffed suitor, because, as I say again, 
such aggressions were so little in order for me; 
but I remember that on my once offering him my 
company in conditions, those of some planned 
excursion, in which it wasn't desired, his putting 
the question of our difference at rest, with the 
minimum of explanation, by the responsible re- 
mark: "7 play with boys who curse and swear!" 
I had sadly to recognise that I didn't, that I 
couldn't pretend to have come to that yet — and 
truly, as I look back, either the unadvisedness 
and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on 
all that ground must have been complete (an 
interesting note on our general manners after all,) 

259 



260 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 



or my personal failure to grasp must have been. 
Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I 
wondered then in just what company my brother's 
privilege was exercised; though if he had but 
richly wished to be discouraging he quite suc- 
ceeded. It wasn't that I mightn't have been 
drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply 
wasn't qualified. All boys, I rather found, were 
difficult to play with — unless it was that they 
rather found me; but who would have been so 
difficult as these? They account but Httle, more- 
over, I make out, for W. J.'s eclipses; so that I 
take refuge easily enough in the memory of my 
own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have 
excluded other views. I also plied the pencil, or 
to be more exact the pen — even if neither imple- 
ment critically, rapidly or summarily. I was so 
often engaged at that period, it strikes me, in 
literary — or, to be more precise in dramatic, ac- 
companied by pictorial composition — that I must 
again and again have delightfully lost myself. I 
had not on any occasion personally succeeded, 
amid our theatric strife, in reaching the footlights; 
but how could I have doubted, nevertheless, with 
our large theatrical experience, of the nature, and 
of my understanding, of the dramatic form? I 
sacrificed to it with devotion — by the aid of 
certain quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in 
Sixth Avenue for the purpose (my father's store. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 261 

though I held him a great fancier of the article in 
general, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in 
particular for the happy provision by which each 
fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank. 
When the drama itself had covered three pages 
the last one, over which I most laboured, served 
for the illustration of what I had verbally pre- 
sented. Every scene had thus its explanatory 
picture, and as each act — though I am not posi- 
tively certain I arrived at acts — would have had 
its vivid climax. Addicted in that degree to Ac- 
tive evocation, I yet recall, on my part, no prac- 
tice whatever of narrative prose or any sort of 
verse. I cherished the "scene" — as I had so 
vibrated to the idea of it that evening at Linwood; 
I thought, I lisped, at any rate I composed, in 
scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes 
"came" is another affair. Entrances, exits, the 
indication of "business," the animation of dia- 
logue, the multiplication of designated characters, 
were things delightful in themselves — while I 
panted toward the canvas on which I should fling 
my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it 
had taken me to write what went with it, but 
which had on the other hand something of the 
interest of the dramatist's casting of his personcBy 
and must have helped me to believe in the validity 
of my subject. 

From where on these occasions that subject can 



262 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

have dropped for me I am at a loss to say, and 
indeed have a strong impression that I didn't at 
any moment quite know what I was writing about; 
I am sure I couldn't otherwise have written so 
much. With scenes, when I think, what certi- 
tude did I want more? — scenes being the root 
of the matter, especially when they bristled with 
proper names and noted movements; especially, 
above all, when they flowered at every pretext 
into the very optic and perspective of the stage, 
where the boards diverged correctly, from a cen- 
tral point of vision, even as the lashes from an 
eyelid, straight down to the footlights. Let this 
reminiscence remind us of how rarely in those 
days the real stage was carpeted. The difficulty 
of composition was naught; the one difficulty was 
in so placing my figures on the fourth page that 
these radiations could be marked without making 
lines through them. The odd part of all of which 
was that whereas my cultivation of the picture 
was maintained my practice of the play, my ad- 
diction to scenes, presently quite dropped. I was 
capable of learning, though with inordinate slow- 
ness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not capa- 
ble, with whatever patience, of making proper 
pictures; yet I aspired to this form of design to 
the prejudice of any other, and long after those 
primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts 
at it, I cared so much for nothing else, and that 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 263 

vaguely redressed, as to a point, my general fail- 
ure of acuteness. I nursed the conviction, or at 
least I tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or 
of the watercolour brush should once become in- 
tense enough it would make up for other weak- 
nesses of grasp — much as that would certainly 
give it to do. This was a very false scent, which 
had however the excuse that my brother's example 
really couldn't but act upon me — the scent was 
apparently so true for him; from the moment 
my small *' interest in art," that is my bent for 
gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was ab- 
sorbing and genuine. There were elements in 
the case that made it natural: the picture, the 
representative design, directly and strongly ap- 
pealed to me, and was to appeal all my days, and 
I was only slow to recognise the kind, in this 
order, that appealed most. My face was turned 
from the first to the idea of representation — that 
of the gain of charm, interest, mystery, dignity, 
distinction, gain of importance in fine, on the part 
of the represented thing (over the thing of acci- 
dent, of mere actuality, still unappropriated;) but 
in the house of representation there were many 
chambers, each with its own lock, and long was 
to be the business of sorting and trying the keys. 
When I at last found deep in my pocket the one 
I could more or less work, it was to feel, with reas- 
surance, that the picture was still after all in es- 



264 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

sence one's aim. So there had been in a manner 
continuity, been not so much waste as one had 
sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are 
sweetened for memory as by the taste of the 
economy they have led to or imposed and from 
the vantage of which they could scarce look bet- 
ter if they had been current and blatant profit. 
Wasn't the very bareness of the field itseK more- 
over a challenge, in a degree, to design? — not, I 
mean, that there seemed to one's infant eyes too 
few things to paint: as to that there were always 
plenty — but for the very reason that there were 
more than anyone noticed, and that a hunger was 
thus engendered which one cast about to gratify. 
The gratification nearest home was the imitative, 
the emulative — that is on my part; W. J., I see, 
needed no reasons, no consciousness other than 
that of being easily able. So he drew because he 
could, while I did so in the main only because he 
did; though I think we cast about, as I say, alike, 
making the most of every image within view. I 
doubt if he made more than I even then did, 
though earlier able to account for what he made. 
Afterwards, on other ground and in richer air, 1 
admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not 
in the bareness of aspects, with their natural re- 
sult of hunger appeased; exhibitions, illustrations 
abounded in Paris and London — the reflected 
image hung everywhere about; so that if there 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 265 

we daubed afresh and with more confidence it was 
not because no-one but because everyone did. In 
fact when I call our appetite appeased I speak less 
of our browsing vision, which was tethered and 
insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal 
character of our own proceedings. In Europe we 
knew there was Art, just as there were soldiers 
and lodgings and concierges and little boys in the 
streets who stared at us, especially at our hats 
and boots, as at things of derision — just as, to 
put it negatively, there were practically no hot 
rolls and no iced water. Perhaps too, I should 
add, we didn't enjoy the works of Mr. Benjamin 
Haydon, then clustered at the Pantheon in Oxford 
Street, which in due course became our favourite 
haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had 
enjoyed those arrayed at the Dusseldorf collection 
in Broadway; whence the huge canvas of the 
Martyrdom of John Huss comes back to me in 
fact as a revelation of representational brightness 
and charm that pitched once for all in these mat- 
ters my young sense of what should be. 

Ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation 
which the Broadway of the 'fifties had been, when 
all was said, so adequate to supply. If one wanted 
pictures there were pictures, as large, I seem to 
remember, as the side of a house, and of a bravery 
of colour and lustre of surface that I was never 
afterwards to see surpassed. We were shown with- 



266 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

out doubt, under our genial law here too, every- 
thing there was, and as I cast up the items I won- 
der, I confess, what ampler fare we could have 
dealt with. The Diisseldorf school commanded 
the market, and I think of its exhibition as firmly 
seated, going on from year to year — New York, 
judging now to such another tune, must have 
been a brave patron of that manufacture; I 
believe that scandal even was on occasion not 
evaded, rather was boldly invoked, though of what 
particular sacrifices to the pure plastic or un- 
draped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the com- 
fortable German genius of that period may have 
been capable history has kept no record. New 
accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which 
the freshness and brightness of the paint, par- 
ticularly lustrous in our copious light, enhanced 
from time to time the show, which I have the 
sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visit- 
ing and which comes back to me with some vague- 
ness as installed in a disaffected church, where 
gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a 
mild order helped the importance. No impres- 
sion here, however, was half so momentous as 
that of the epoch-making masterpiece of Mr. 
Leutze, which showed us Washington crossing the 
Delaware in a wondrous flare of projected gas- 
light and with the effect of a revelation to my 
young sight of the capacity of accessories to 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 267 

"stand out." I live again in the thrill of that 
evening — which was the greater of course for my 
feeling it, in my parents' company, when I should 
otherwise have been in bed. We went down, after 
dinner, in the Fourteenth Street stage, quite as 
if going to the theatre; the scene of exhibition 
was near the Stuyvesant Institute (a circumstance 
stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, 
echoes probably of lectures discussed at home, yet 
at which my attendance had doubtless conveni- 
ently lapsed,) but Mr. Leutze's drama left behind 
any paler proscenium. We gaped responsive to 
every item, lost in the marvel of the wintry light, 
of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sickness 
of the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor 
objects, that of the strands of the rope and the 
nails of the boots, that, I say, on the part of every- 
thing, of its determined purpose of standing out; 
but that, above all, of the profiled national hero's 
purpose, as might be said, of standing up, as much 
as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on one 
leg, in such difficulties, and successfully balancing. 
So memorable was that evening to remain for me 
that nothing could be more strange, in connection 
with it, than the illustration by the admired work, 
on its in after years again coming before me, of 
the cold cruelty with which time may turn and 
devour its children. The picture, more or less 
entombed in its relegation, was lividly dead — 



268 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and that was bad enough. But half the substance 
of one's youth seemed buried with it. There were 
other pictorial evenings, I may add, not all of 
which had the thrill. Deep the disappointment, 
on my own part, I remember, at Bryan's Gallery 
of Christian Art, to which also, as for great emo- 
tions, we had taken the omnibus after dinner. It 
cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten diptychs 
and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of 
black Madonnas and obscure Bambinos, of such 
marked and approved "primitives" as had never 
yet been shipped to our shores. Mr. Bryan's 
shipment was presently to fall, I believe, under 
grave suspicion, was to undergo in fact fatal expo- 
sure; but it appealed at the moment in apparent 
good faith, and I have not forgotten how, con- 
scious that it was fresh from Europe — "fresh" 
was beautiful in the connection ! — I felt that my 
yearning should all have gone out to it. With 
that inconsequence to handle I doubt whether I 
proclaimed that it bored me — any more than I 
have ever noted till now that it made me begin 
badly with Christian art. I like to think that the 
collection consisted without abatement of frauds 
and "fakes" and that if these had been honest 
things my perception wouldn't so have slumbered; 
yet the principle of interest had been somehow 
compromised, and I think I have never since stood 
before a real Primitive, a primitive of the primi- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 269 

lives, without having first to shake off the grey 
mantle of that night. The main disconcertment 
had been its ugly twist to the name of Italy, already 
sweet to me for all its dimness — even could dim- 
ness have prevailed in my felt measure of the pic- 
torial testimony of home, testimony that dropped 
for us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, "the 
American Turner" which covered half a side of 
our front parlour, and in which, though not an 
object represented in it began to stand out after 
the manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose 
myself as soon as look. It depicted Florence from 
one of the neighbouring hills — I have often since 
wondered which, the picture being long ago lost 
to our sight; Florence with her domes and towers 
and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had engaged 
for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to 
know and love the place in after years. Then it 
was I felt how long before my attachment had 
started on its course — that closer vision was no 
beginning, it only took up the tale; just as it 
comes to me again to-day, at the end of time, that 
the contemplative monk seated on a terrace in 
the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, 
must have been of the convent of San Miniato, 
which gives me the site from which the painter 
wrought. We had Italy again in the correspond- 
ing room behind — a great abundance of Italy 
I was free to think while I revolved between an- 



270 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

other large landscape over the sofa and the classic 
marble bust on a pedestal between the two back 
windows, the figure, a part of the figure, of a lady 
with her head crowned with vine-leaves and her 
hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by 
the front of her dress, as my next younger brother 
exposed himself to my derision by calling the bit 
of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depend- 
ing from a single shoulder-strap, so imperfectly 
covered her. This image was known and admired 
among us as the Bacchante; she had come to us 
straight from an American studio in Rome, and 
I see my horizon flush again with the first faint 
dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words 
of the critical spirit, while two or three of the 
more restrictive friends of the house find our mar- 
ble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold in- 
deed she must have been — quite as of the tomb- 
stone temperament; but that objection would 
drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since 
nymphs were mild and moderate, and since dis- 
cussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days 
on that issue of the producible name. I fondly 
recall, by the same token, that playing on a cer- 
tain occasion over the landscape above the sofa, 
restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hear- 
ing, introduced me to what had probably been 
my very first chance, on such ground, for active 
participation. The picture, from the hand of a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 271 

French painter, M. Lefevre, and of but slightly 
scanter extent than the work of Mr. Cole, repre- 
sented in frank rich colours and as a so-called 
"view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuber- 
ance, a broken and precipitous place, amid moun- 
tains and forests, where two or three bare-legged 
peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much 
emphasis of posture, in felling a badly gashed but 
spreading oak by means of a tense rope attached 
to an upper limb and at which they pulled to- 
gether. * ' Tuscany ? — are you sure it's Tuscany ? ' ' 
said the voice of restrictive criticism, that of the 
friend of the house who in the golden age of the 
precursors, though we were still pretty much pre- 
cursors, had hved longest in Italy. And then on 
my father's challenge of this demur: "Oh in Tus- 
cany, you know, the colours are much softer — 
there would be a certain haze in the atmosphere." 
"Why, of course," I can hear myself now blush- 
ingly but triumphantly intermingle — "the soft- 
ness and the haze of our Florence there: isn't 
Florence in Tuscany .f'" It had to be parentally 
admitted that Florence was — besides which our 
friend had been there and knew; so that there- 
after, within our walls, a certain malaise reigned, 
for if the Florence was "like it" then the Lefevre 
couldn't be, and if the Lefevre was like it then the 
Florence couldn't: a lapse from old convenience 
— as from the moment we couldn't name the 



272 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Lefevre where were we? All of which it might 
have been open to me to feel I had uncannily 
promoted. 



XX 

MY own sense of the great matter, mean- 
while — that is of our possibiHties, still 
more than of our actualities, of Italy in 
general and of Florence in particular — was a 
perfectly recoverable little awareness, as I find, 
of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence on 
the part of an absent pair in whom our parents 
were closely interested and whose communications, 
whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine letters, let- 
ters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept 
open, in our air, more than any other sweet irri- 
tation, that "question of Europe" which was to 
have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, 
so shortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder 
had, early in our Fourteenth Street period, mar- 
ried Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that neigh- 
bourhood and of our house in it from the first, 
but never more than during a winter spent with 
us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an ex- 
tension of interest and admiration — she was in 
those years quite exceedingly handsome — ranked 
for us with the Albany aunts, adding so a twist, 
as it were, to our tie with the Temple cousins, her 

own close kin. This couple must have been, put- 

273 



274 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

ting real relatives aside, my parents' best friends 
in Europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm 
thread attached at one end to our general desire 
and at the other to their supposed felicity. The 
real relatives, those planted out in the same coun- 
tries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect 
on us, whose place in our vision, I should like to 
trace: that of the Kings, for instance, of my 
mother's kin, that of the Masons, of my father's 
— the Kings who cultivated, for years, the high- 
est instructional, social and moral possibilities at 
Geneva, the Masons, above all, less strenuous but 
more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us 
hauntingly, during a considerable period, as en- 
joying every conceivable agrement at Tours and 
at the then undeveloped Trouville, even the win- 
ter Trouville, on the lowest possible terms. Fain 
would I, as for the "mere pleasure" of it, under 
the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose 
net the singularly sharp and rounded image of 
our cousin Charlotte of the former name, who 
figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever 
we looked, and all the rest of time, as a character 
of characters and a marvel of placid consistency; 
through my vague remembrance of her return from 
China after the arrest of a commercial career 
there by her husband's death in the Red Sea — 
which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of 
death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 275 

Christmas treat of our childhood under her roof 
in Gramercy Park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in 
that twihght of time, dimmer offspring, Vernon, 
Anne, Arthur, marked to us always, in the dis- 
tincter years, as of all our young relatives the 
most intensely educated and most pointedly 
proper — an occasion followed by her permanent 
and invidious withdrawal from her own country. 
I would keep her in my eye through the Genevese 
age and on to the crisis of the Civil War, in which 
Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for 
his Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg 
a young life of understanding and pain, uncom- 
memorated as to the gallantry of its end — he had 
insistently returned to the front, after a recovery 
from first wounds, as under his mother's maledic- 
tion — on the stone beneath which he lies in the 
old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his 
father's family. I should further pursue my sub- 
ject through other periods and places, other con- 
stantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to the very 
end of the story — which for myself was the im- 
pression, first, of a little lonely, soft- voiced, gentle, 
relentless lady, in a dull Surrey garden of a sum- 
mer afternoon, more than haK blind and all de- 
pendent on the dame de compagnie who read aloud 
to her that Saturday Review which had ever been 
the prop and mirror of her opinions and to which 
she remained faithful, her children estranged and 



276 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 



outworn, dead and ignored; and the vision, second 
and for a climax, of an old-world rez-de-chaussee at 
Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in 
presence of the end (end of her very personal ca- 
reer, I mean, but not of her perfectly firm spirit 
or of her charmingly smooth address). 

I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease 
of re-capture of my young consciousness; so that 
I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my 
abundance down. The place for the lapse con- 
sents with difficulty, however, to be any particular 
point of the past at which I catch myself (easily 
caught as I am) looking about me; it has cer- 
tainly nothing in common with that coign of van- 
tage enjoyed by me one June afternoon of 1855 
in the form of the minor share of the box of a car- 
riage that conveyed us for the first time since our 
babyhood, W. J.'s and mine, through so much of 
a vast portentous London. I was an item in the 
overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and I 
thrilled with the spectacle my seat beside the 
coachman so amply commanded — without know- 
ing at this moment why, amid other claims, I had 
been marked for such an eminence. I so far jus- 
tify my privilege at least as still to feel that prime 
impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep 
down, the whole mass of later observation. There 
are London aspects which, so far as they still 
touch me, after all the years, touch me as just 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 277 

sensible reminders of this hour of early appre- 
hension, so penetrated for me as to have kept its 
ineffaceable stamp. For at last we had come to 
Europe — we had disembarked at Liverpool, but 
a couple of days before, from that steamer Atlan- 
tic, of the Collins line, then active but so soon to 
be utterly undone, of which I had kept a romantic 
note ever since a certain evening of a winter or 
two before. I had on that occasion assisted with 
my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition — 
the theatre is distinct to me as Brougham's — 
one of the features of which was the at that time 
flourishing farce of Betsy Baker, a picture of 
some predicament, supposed droll, of its hero Mr. 
Mouser, whose wife, if I am correct, carries on a 
laundry and controls as she may a train of young 
assistants. A feature of the piece comes back to 
me as the pursuit of Mr. Mouser round and round 
the premises by the troop of laundresses, shouting 
his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, 
though whether through fear of their endearments 
or of their harsher violence I fail to remember. 
It was enough that the public nerve had at the 
moment been tried by the non-arrival of the At- 
lantic, several days overdue, to the pitch at last 
of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall 
of the curtain on the farce the distracted Mr. 
Mouser, still breathless, reappeared at the foot- 
lights, where I can see him now abate by his plight 



278 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

no jot of the dignity of his announcement, *' Ladies 
and gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that 
the good ship Atlantic is safe!" the house broke 
into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a roar 
of relief, as I had never heard the like of and which 
gave me my first measure of a great immediate 
public emotion — even as the incident itseK to- 
day reminds me of the family-party smallness of 
the old New York, those happy limits that could 
make us all care, and care to fond vociferation, 
for the same thing at once. It was a moment of 
the golden age — representing too but a snatch 
of elation, since the wretched Arctic had gone 
down in mortal woe and her other companion, the 
Pacific, leaving England a few months later and 
under the interested eyes of our family group, 
then temporarily settled in London, was never 
heard of more. Let all of which show again what 
traps are laid about me for unguarded acute rem- 
iniscence. 

I meet another of these, though I positively try 
to avoid it, in the sense of a day spent on the great 
fusty curtained bed, a mediaeval four-poster such 
as I had never seen, of the hotel at the London 
and North- Western station, where it appeared, to 
our great inconvenience, that I had during the 
previous months somewhere perversely absorbed 
(probably on Staten Island upwards of a year be- 
fore) the dull seed of malaria, which now suddenly 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 279 

broke out in chills and fever. This condition, of 
the intermittent order, hampered our movements 
but left alternate days on which we could travel, 
and as present to me as ever is the apprehended 
interest of my important and determinant state 
and of our complicated prospect while I lay, much 
at my ease — for I recall in particular certain 
short sweet times when I could be left alone — 
with the thick and heavy suggestions of the Lon- 
don room about me, the very smell of which was 
ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation 
altogether, and the window open to the English 
June and the far off hum of a thousand possibili- 
ties. I consciously took them in, these last, and 
must then, I think, have first tasted the very 
greatest pleasure perhaps I was ever to know — 
that of almost holding my breath in presence of 
certain aspects to the end of so taking in. It was 
as if in those hours that precious fine art had been 
disclosed to me — scantly as the poor place and 
the small occasion might have seemed of an order 
to promote it. We seize our property by an avid 
instinct wherever we find it, and I must have kept 
seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all 
by this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, 
through the whole succession of those summer 
days. The next application of it that stands out 
for me, or the next that I make room for here, 
since I note after all so much less than I remember. 



280 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

is the intensity of a fond apprehension of Paris, 
a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel that 
hung, through the soft summer night, over the 
Rue de la Paix. I hung with the balcony, and 
doubtless with my brothers and my sister, though 
I recover what I felt as so much relation and re- 
sponse to the larger, the largest appeal only, that 
of the whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to my- 
self always to have possessed mentally — even if 
I had but just turned twelve ! — and that now 
filled out its frame or case for me from every 
lighted window, up and down, as if each of these 
had been, for strength of sense, a word in some 
immortal quotation, the very breath of civilised 
lips. How I had anciently gathered such stores 
of preconception is more than I shall undertake 
an account of — though I believe I should be able 
to scrape one together; certain it is at any rate 
that half the beauty of the whole exposed sec- 
ond floor of a modiste just opposite, for instance, 
with the Sittings and figurings, as well as the in- 
tent immobilities, of busy young women descried 
through frank, and, as it were, benignant aper- 
tures, and of such bright fine strain that they but 
asked to work far into the night, came from the 
effect on the part of these things of so exactly 
crowning and comforting I couldn't have said 
what momentous young dream. I might have 
been right to myself — as against some danger of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 281 

being wrong, and if I had uttered my main com- 
ment on it all this must certainly have been "I 
told you so, I told you so!" What I had told 
myself was of course that the impression would 
be of the richest and at the same time of the most 
insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very 
close; but I had had before me from far back a 
picture (which might have been hung in the very 
sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with 
a charm. Had I ever till then known what a 
charm was? — a large, a local, a social charm, 
leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at 
all events, this mystery, one's property — that of 
one's mind; and so, once for all, I helped myself 
to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It 
counted all immensely for practice in taking in. 

I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days 
later, at an hour that has never ceased to recur to 
me all my life as crucial, as supremely determinant. 
The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on 
the way from Lyons to Geneva, between which 
places there was then no railway; a village now 
nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, 
in the Jura, where we were to spend the night. I 
was stretched at my ease on a couch formed by a 
plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a 
small mattress and other draperies; an indul- 
gence founded on my visitation of fever, which, 
though not now checking our progress, assured 



282 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

me, in our little band, these invidious luxuries. 
It may have been that as my body was pampered 
so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for 
my appropriative instinct had neglected no item 
of our case from the first — by which I mean from 
the moment of our getting under way, that morn- 
ing, with much elaboration, in the court of the 
old Hotel de I'llnivers at Lyons, where we had 
arrived two days before and awaited my good 
pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed 
for us perhaps somewhat less than any pair of 
days yet, but as regards which it was afterwards 
my complacent theory that my contemplative 
rest at the ancient inn, with all the voices and 
graces of the past, of the court, of the French 
scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, 
as such, in particular, had prepared me not a 
little, when I should in due course hear of it, for 
what was meant by the vie de province — that 
expression which was to become later on so toned, 
as old fine colour and old fine opinion are toned. 
It was the romance of travel, and it was the 
suggested romance, flushed with suppositions and 
echoes, with implications and memories, mem- 
ories of one's *' reading," save the mark! all the 
more that our proper bestowal required two 
carriages, in which we were Iq "post," ineffable 
thought, and which bristled with every kind of 
contradiction of common experience. The pos- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 283 

tilion, in a costume rather recalling, from the halls 
of Ferrero, that of my debardeur, bobbed up and 
down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black- 
whiskered and acquired in London, sat in the 
rumble along with Annette Godefroi of Metz, 
fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a 
"bonne Lorraine" if ever there was, acquired in 
New York: I enjoy the echo of their very names, 
neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet 
which melt together for me, to intensification, 
with all the rest; with the recovered moment, 
above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool 
sunshine — we had mounted and mounted — dur- 
ing which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I took 
in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that 
testified to some power of elbow, a larger draught 
of the wine of perception than any I had ever 
before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The 
village street, which was not as village streets 
hitherto known to me, opened out, beyond an in- 
terval, into a high place on which perched an ob- 
ject also a fresh revelation and that I recognised 
with a deep joy — though a joy that was doubt- 
less partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated 
illness and of cold chicken — as at once a castle 
and a ruin. The only castle within my ken had 
been, by my impression, the machicolated villa 
above us the previous summer at New Brighton, 
and as I had seen no structure rise beyond that 



284 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

majesty so I had seen none abased to the dignity 
of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this 
latter phase, and I was already somehow aware 
of a deeper note in the crumbled castle than any 
note of the solid one — little experience as I had 
had either of solidity. At a point in the interval, 
at any rate, below the slope on which this me- 
mento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a 
white shirt and a red petticoat, engaged in some 
sort of field labour, the effect of whose interven- 
tion just then is almost beyond my notation. I 
knew her for a peasant in sabots — the first peas- 
ant I had ever beheld, or beheld at least to such 
advantage. She had in the whole aspect an enor- 
mous value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic 
strength the truth that sank in as I lay — the 
ti*uth of one's embracing there, in all the presented 
character of the scene, an amount of character I 
had felt no scene present, not even the one I had 
raked from the Hotel Westminster; the sort of 
thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, 
would sit most warmly in the mind. Supremely, 
in that ecstatic vision, was "Europe," sublime 
synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me — as 
if by a mystic gage, which spread all through the 
summer air, that I should now, only now, never 
lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to 
that time it might have been but mockingly 
whisked before me. Europe mightn't have been 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 285 

flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most 
signified and summarised in a sordid old woman 
scraping a mean hving and an uninhabitable tower 
abandoned to the owls; that was but the momen- 
tary measure of a small sick boy, however, and 
the virtue of the impression was proportioned to 
my capacity. It made a bridge over to more 
things than I then knew. 



XXI 

How shall I render certain other impres- 
sions coming back to me from that sum- 
mer, which were doubtless involved in my 
having still for a time, on the alternate days when 
my complaint was active, to lie up on various 
couches and, for my main comfort, consider the 
situation? I considered it best, I think, gather- 
ing in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to it, 
in certain umbrageous apartments in which my 
parents had settled themselves near Geneva; an 
old house, in ample grounds and among great 
spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our win- 
dows in the summer heats and airs, known, if I 
am not mistaken, as the Campagne Gerebsoff — 
which its mistress, an invalid Russian lady, had 
partly placed at our disposition while she reclined 
in her own quarter of the garden, on a chaise 
longue and under a mushroom hat with a green 
veil, and I, in the course of the mild excursions 
appointed as my limit, considered her from afar 
in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to 
her identity, history, general practices and pro- 
ceedings, by my younger brother Wilky, who, ac- 
cording to his nature, or I may say to his genius, 

286 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 287 

had made without loss of time great advances of 
acquaintance with her and quickened thereby my 
sense of his superior talent for hfe. Wilky's age 
followed closely on mine, and from that time on 
we conversed and consorted, though with lapses 
and disparities; I being on the whole, during the 
succession of those years, in the grateful, the really 
fortunate position of having one exposure, rather 
the northward, as it were, to the view of W. J., 
and the other, perhaps the more immediately 
sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. 
Of this I shall have more to say, but to meet in 
memory meanwhile even this early flicker of him 
is to know again something of the sense that I 
attached all along our boyhood to his successful 
sociability, his instinct for intercourse, his genius 
(as I have used the word) for making friends. It 
was the only genius he had, declaring itseK from 
his tenderest years, never knowing the shadow of 
defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back 
and by the very radiation of the fact, endlessly 
much to think of. For I had in a manner, thanks 
to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geni- 
ality was absolutely such that the friends he made 
were made almost less for himself, so to speak, 
than for other friends — of whom indeed we, his 
own adjuncts, were easily first — so far at least 
as he discriminated. At night all cats are grey, 
and in this brother's easy view all his acquaintance 



288 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

were his family. The trail of his sociability was 
over us all alike — though it here concerns me 
but to the effect, as I recover it, of its weight on 
my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is 
called taking life. I must have already at the 
Campagne Gerebsoff begun to see him take it 
with all his directness — begun in fact to be a 
trifle tormentedly aware that, though there might 
be many ways of so doing, we are condemned 
practically to a choice, not made free of them all; 
reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it 
is to our interest to make the most of, since we 
may indeed sometimes make much. There was a 
small sad charm, I should doubtless add, in this 
operation of the contrast of the case before me 
with my own case; it was positively as if Wilky's 
were supplying me on occasion with the most im- 
mediate matter for my own. That was particu- 
larly marked after he had, with our elder brother, 
been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, 
at Chatelaine, then much esteemed and where I 
was supposedly to join them on my complete 
recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable 
sorties thence on the part of the pair as promptly 
breaking out, not less than I recall sociable after- 
noon visits to the establishment on the part of 
the rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding 
school, but as we had in the New York conditions 
kept punctually rejoining our family, so in these 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 289 

pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the 
attention. Of this also more anon; my particu- 
lar point is just the wealth of Wilky's contribu- 
tion to my rich current consciousness — the con- 
sciousness fairly made rich by my taking in, as 
aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours when I was 
in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, 
our almost haunted interior. 

Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of 
the ancient villas planted about Geneva, and our 
house affected me as so massive and so spacious 
that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had 
never before lived so long in anything so old and, 
as I somehow felt, so deep; depth, depth upon 
depth, was what came out for me at certain times 
of my waiting above, in my immense room of 
thick embrasures and rather prompt obscurity, 
while the summer afternoon waned and my com- 
panions, often below at dinner, lingered and left 
me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed. That was 
the sense of it — the character, in the whole place, 
pressed upon me with a force I hadn't met and 
that was beyond my analysis — which is but an- 
other way of saying how directly notified I felt 
that such material conditions as I had known could 
have had no depth at all. My depth was a vague 
measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twi- 
light, for an occasional small sound of voice or 
step from the garden or the rooms of which the 



290 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

great homely, the opaque green shutters opened 
there softly to echo in — mixed with reverbera- 
tions finer and more momentous, personal, ex- 
perimental, if they might be called so; which I 
much encouraged (they borrowed such tone from 
our new surrounding medium) and half of which 
were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's 
experience: these latter, irrepressibly communi- 
cated, being ever, enviably, though a trifle be- 
wilderingly and even formidably, of personalities. 
There was the difference and the opposition, as 
I really believe I was already aware — that one 
way of taking life was to go in for everything and 
everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, 
and the other way was to be as occupied, quite as 
occupied, just with the sense and the image of it 
all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: 
a circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken 
almost equally both ways — that, I mean, seemed 
the strangeness; mere brute quantity and num- 
ber being so much less in one case than the other. 
These latter were what I should have liked to go 
in for, had I but had the intrinsic faculties; that 
more than ever came home to me on those occa- 
sions when, as I could move further and stay out 
longer, I accompanied my parents on afternoon 
visits to Chatelaine and the Campagne Roediger, 
a scene that has remained with me as nobly placid 
and pastoral. The great trees stood about, cast- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 291 

ing afternoon shadows; the old thick- walled green- 
shuttered villa and its dependances had the air of 
the happiest home; the big bearded bonhomie of 
M. Roediger among his Httle polyglot charges — 
no petits pays chauds these — appeared to justify, 
and more, the fond New York theory of Swiss 
education, the kind a la portee of young New 
Yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, 
civilised, even romanticised thing, in which, amid 
lawny mountain slopes, "the languages" flowed 
into so many beaming recipients on a stream of 
milk and honey, and "the relation," above all, the 
relation from master to pupil and back again, 
was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of 
this world save for the providential arrangement 
of a perfect pedagogic Switzerland. "Did you 
notice the relation — how charming it was?" our 
parents were apt to say to each other after these 
visits, in reference to some observed show of con- 
fidence between instructor and instructed; while, 
as for myself, I was lost in the wonder of all the 
relations — my younger brother seemed to live, 
and to his own ingenuous rehsh as well, in such a 
happy hum of them. The languages had reason 
to prosper — they were so copiously represented ; 
the English jostled the American, the Russian the 
German, and there even trickled through a little 
funny French. 

A great Geneva school of those days was the 



292 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Institution Haccius, to which generations of our 
young countrymen had been dedicated and our 
own faces first turned — under correction, how- 
ever, by the perceived truth that if the languages 
were in question the American reigned there almost 
unchallenged. The establishment chosen for our 
experiment must have appealed by some intimate 
and insinuating side, and as less patronised by the 
rich and the sophisticated — for even in those 
days some Americans were rich and several so- 
phisticated; little indeed as it was all to matter 
in the event, so short a course had the experiment 
just then to run. What it mainly brings back to 
me is the fine old candour and queerness of the 
New York state of mind, begotten really not a 
little, I think, under our own roof, by the mere 
charmed perusal of Rodolphe Toeppfer's Voyages 
en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which 
delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its 
illustrations, had come out early in the 'fifties and 
had engaged our fondest study. It is the copious 
chronicle, by a schoolmaster of endless humour 
and sympathy — of what degree and form of 
"authority" it never occurred to one even to ask 
— of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly 
on foot and with staff and knapsack, through the 
incomparable Switzerland of the time before the 
railways and the "rush," before the monster ho- 
tels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised val- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 293 

leys, the circular tours, the perforating tubes, the 
funiculars, the hordes, the horrors. To turn back 
to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of 
a lost paradise, and the effect for me even yet of 
having pored over them in my childhood is to 
steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the 
pictures — his own illustrations are of the pleas- 
antest and drollest, and the association makes 
that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, of 
the so-called calamites, a quite sufficient Ruys- 
dael. It must have been conceived for us that we 
would lead in these conditions — always in pur- 
suit of an education — a life not too dissimilar to 
that of the storied exiles in the forest of Arden; 
though one would fain not press, after all, upon 
ideals of culture so little organised, so little con- 
scious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of 
comparison and competition, of imposed prepara- 
tion. This particular loose ideal reached out from 
the desert — or what might under discourage- 
ment pass for such; it invoked the light, but a 
simpKcity of view which was somehow one with 
the beauty of other convictions accompanied its 
effort; and though a glance at the social *' psy- 
chology" of some of its cheerful estimates, its 
relative importances, assumed and acted upon, 
might here seem indicated, there are depths of 
the ancient serenity that nothing would induce 
me to sound. 



294 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

I need linger the less, moreover, since we in 
fact, oddly enough, lingered so little; so very Ut- 
tle, for reasons doubtless well known to ourselves 
at the time but which I at present fail to recap- 
ture, that what next stands vividly out for me is 
our renewed passage through Paris on the way 
to London for the winter; a turn of our situation 
invested at the time with nothing whatever of the 
wonderful, yet which would again half prompt 
me to soundings were I not to recognise in it that 
mark of the fitful, that accent of the improvised, 
that general quality of earnest and reasoned, yet 
at the same time almost passionate, impatience 
which was to devote us for some time to variety, 
almost to incoherency, of interest. We had fared 
across the sea under the glamour of the Swiss 
school in the abstract, but the Swiss school in the 
concrete soon turned stale on our hands; a fact 
over which I remember myself as no further crit- 
ical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one 
was all eyes and the world decidedly, at such a 
pace, all images, it ministered to the panoramic. 
It ministered, to begin with, through our very 
early start for Lyons again in the October dawn 
— without Nadali or the carriages this time, but 
on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow and 
rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of 
which the high haughtiness was such that it could 
stop, even for an instant, only at appointed and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 295 

much dissevered places — to the effect, I recall, 
of its vainly attempted arrest by our cousin 
Charlotte King, beforementioned, whom I see now 
suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from 
some rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple 
villeggiatura, "rien que pour saluer ces dames," 
as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she prac- 
tically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving 
with me still the wonder of her happy fusion of 
opposites. The coach had not, in the event, 
paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored 
flush and flurry quite as it defied delay, she was 
equally a match for it in these particulars, blandly 
achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on, mak- 
ing a perfect success and a perfect grace of her 
idea. She dropped as elegantly out as she had 
gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must 
much have wished they could emulate her art. 
Save for this my view of that migration has faded, 
though to shine out again to the sense of our early 
morning arrival in Paris a couple of days later, 
and our hunt there, vain at first, for an hotel that 
would put us numerously up; vain till we had 
sat awhile, in the Rue du Helder, I think, before 
that of an Albany uncle, luckily on the scene and 
finally invoked, who after some delay descended 
to us with a very foreign air, I fancied, and no 
possibility, to his regret, of placing us under his 
own roof; as if indeed, I remember reflecting, we 



296 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

could, such as we were, have been desired to share 
his foreign interests — such as they were. He 
espoused our cause, however, with gay goodna- 
ture — while I wondered, in my admiration for 
him and curiosity about him, how he really liked 
us, and (a bit doubtfully) whether I should have 
liked us had I been in his place; and after some 
further adventure installed us at the Hotel de la 
Ville de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Eveque, a 
resort now long since extinct, though it lingered 
on for some years, and which I think of as rather 
huddled and disappointingly private, to the abate- 
ment of spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond 
a wall, a high gateway and a more or less cobbled 
court. 



XXII 

IITTLE else of that Parisian passage remains 
J with me — it was probably of the briefest; 
I recover only a visit with my father to the 
Palais de I'lndustrie, where the first of the great 
French Exhibitions, on the model, much reduced, 
of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was still 
open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and 
from that visit win back but the department 
of the English pictures and our stopping long 
before The Order of Release of a young English 
painter, J. E. Millais, who had just leaped into 
fame, and my impression of the rare treatment 
of whose baby's bare legs, pendent from its moth- 
er's arms, is still as vivid to me as if from yes- 
terday. The vivid yields again to the vague 
— I scarce know why so utterly — till conscious- 
ness, waking up in London, renews itself, late one 
evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel 
(or Coffee-House, as I think it was then still called,) 
which occupied that corner of Piccadilly and Berke- 
ley Street where more modern establishments have 
since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and fam- 
ished American family found on that occasion a 
fine old British virtue in cold roast beef and bread 

297 



298 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and cheese and ale; their expert acclamation of 
which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps 
company there with other matters equally British 
and, as we say now, early Victorian; the thick 
gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the glim- 
mering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the 
fine joint, surpassed only by that of the grave 
waiter's reserve — plain, immutably plain fare all, 
but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief 
and relish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" 
tone, which re-excited expectation, which in fact 
seemed this time to re-announce a basis for faith 
and joy. 

That basis presently shrank to the scale of a 
small house hard by the hotel, at the entrance 
of Berkeley Square — expeditiously lighted on, it 
would thus appear, which again has been expen- 
sively superseded, but to the ancient little facts 
of which I fondly revert, since I owe them what I 
feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint 
revelation, the small broken expression, of the 
London I was afterwards to know. The place 
wears on the spot, to this day, no very different 
face; the house that has risen on the site of ours 
is still immediately neighboured at the left by 
the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news- 
agent, who modestly flourished in our time under 
the same name; the great establishment of Mr. 
Gunter, just further along, is as soberly_and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 299 

solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, 
from the foot of Hay Hill at the right, wanders 
away to Bruton Street with the irregular grace 
that spoke to my young fancy; Hay Hill itself 
is somehow less sharply precipitous, besides being 
no longer paved, as I seem to recall its having 
been, with big boulders, and I was on the point 
of saying that its antique charm in some degree 
abides. Nothing, however, could be further from 
the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, 
years ago, to that erection of lumpish "mansions" 
which followed the demolition of the old-world 
town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, 
on the south side, between court and I suppose 
garden, where Dover Street gives way to Grafton; 
a house of many histories, of vague importances 
and cold reserves and deep suggestions, I used to 
think after scaling the steep quite on purpose to 
wonder about it. A whole chapter of life was con- 
densed, for our young sensibility, I make out, into 
the couple of months — they can scarce have been 
more — spent by us in these quarters, which must 
have proved too narrow and too towny; but it 
can have had no passage so lively as the occur- 
rences at once sequent to my father's having too 
candidly made known in some public print, prob- 
ably The Times, that an American gentleman, at 
such an address, desired to arrange with a com- 
petent young man for the tuition at home of his 



300 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

three sons. The effect of his rash failure to in- 
vite appHcation by letter only was the assault of 
an army of visitors who filled us with consterna- 
tion; they hung about the door, cumbered the 
hall, choked the staircase and sat grimly individual 
in odd corners. How they were dealt with, given 
my father's precipitate and general charity, I can 
but feebly imagine; our own concern, in the event, 
was with a sole selected presence, that of Scotch 
Mr. Robert Thompson, who gave us his care from 
breakfast to luncheon each morning that winter, 
who afterwards carried on a school at Edinburgh, 
and whom, in years long subsequent, I happened 
to help R. L. Stevenson to recognise gaily as his 
early pedagogue. He was so deeply solicitous, 
yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no 
harsher injunction to us ever than "Come now, 
be getting on!" that one could but think well of 
a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; 
while it is doubtless to the credit of his temper 
that remembrance is a blank in respect to his 
closer ministrations. I recall vividly his fresh 
complexion, his very round clear eyes, his ten- 
dency to trip over his own legs or feet while 
thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant 
dress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, 
which was perhaps the prescribed uniform of a 
daily tutor then; but I ask myself in vain what I 
can have "studied" with him, there remaining 



I 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 301 

with me afterwards, to testify — this putting any 
scrap of stored learning aside — no single text- 
book save the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, 
which was given me as (of all things in the world) 
a reward. A reward for what I am again at a 
loss to say — not certainly for having "got on" 
to anything like the tune plaintively, for the most 
part, piped to me. It is a very odd and yet to 
myself very rich and full reminiscence, though I 
remember how, looking back at it from after days, 
W. J. denounced it to me, and with it the follow- 
ing year and more spent in Paris, as a poor and 
arid and lamentable time, in which, missing such 
larger chances and connections as we might have 
reached out to, we had done nothing, he and I, 
but walk about together, in a state of the direst 
propriety, little "high" black hats and invet- 
erate gloves, the childish costume of the place 
and period, to stare at grey street-scenery (that 
of early Victorian London had tones of a neutral- 
ity!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water- 
colours and brushes with which to bedaub eternal 
drawing-blocks. We might, I dare say, have felt 
higher impulses and carried out larger plans — 
though indeed present to me for this, on my 
brother's so expressing himself, is my then quick 
recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver 
needs he at least must have known, and my per- 
fect if rueful sense of having myself had no such 



302 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me 
did they even to that shorter retrospect appear 
in a sort of fatalism of patience, spiritless in a 
manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active, 
productive and ingenious side. 

It was just the fact of our having so walked and 
dawdled and dodged that made the charm of 
memory ; in addition to which what could one have 
asked more than to be steeped in a medium so 
dense that whole elements of it, forms of amuse- 
ment, interest and wonder, soaked through to 
some appreciative faculty and made one fail at 
the most of nothing but one's lessons? My 
brother was right in so far as that my question 
— the one I have just reproduced — could have 
been asked only by a person incorrigible in throw- 
ing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes, 
substitutes that might temporarily have appeared 
queer and small; a person so haunted, even from 
an early age, with visions of life, that aridities, 
for him, were half a terror and half an impossi- 
bility, and that the said substitutes, the econo- 
mies and ingenuities that protested, in their dumb 
vague way, against weakness of situation or of 
direct and applied faculty, were in themselves 
really a revel of spirit and thought. It had in- 
deed again an effect of almost pathetic incohe- 
rence that our brave quest of *'the languages,'* 
suffering so prompt and for the time at least so 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 303 

accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a 
check, should have contented itself with settling 
us by that Christmas in a house, more propitious 
to our development, in St. John's Wood, where 
we enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful 
view, though by that windowed privilege alone, 
of a large green expanse in which ladies and 
gentlemen practised archery. Just that — and not 
the art even, but the mere spectacle — might have 
been one of the substitutes in question; if not for 
the languages at least for one or another of the 
romantic connections we seemed a little to have 
missed: it was such a whiff of the old world of 
Robin Hood as we could never have looked up 
from the mere thumbed "story," in Fourteenth 
Street at any rate, to any soft confidence of. 
More than I can begin to say, that is by a greater 
number of queer small channels, did the world 
about us, thus continuous with the old world of 
Robin Hood, steal into my sense — a constant 
state of subjection to which fact is no bad in- 
stance of those refinements of surrender that I 
just named as my fond practice. I seem to see 
to-day that the London of the 'fifties was even to 
the weak perception of childhood a much less gen- 
eraHsed, a much more eccentrically and variously 
characterised place, than the present great accom- 
modated and accommodating city; it had fewer 
resources but it had many more features, scarce 



304 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

one of which failed to help the whole to bristle 
with what a little gaping American could take for 
an intensity of difference from his supposed order. 
It was extraordinarily the picture and the scene 
of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it 
offered to my presumptuous vision still more the 
reflection of Thackeray — and where is the detail 
of the reflection of Thackeray now? — so that 
as I trod the vast length of Baker Street, the 
Thackerayan vista of other days, I throbbed with 
the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance. 

I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street 
in our little "top" hats and other neatnesses must 
have been what W. J. meant by our poverty of 
life — whereas it was probably one of the very 
things most expressive to myself of the charm and 
the colour of history and (from the point of view 
of the picturesque) of society. We were often in 
Baker Street by reason of those stretched-out 
walks, at the remembered frequency and long- 
drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; re- 
calling at the same time, however, that save for 
Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the 
garden they took for us the place of all other 
agilities. I can't but feel them to have been 
marked in their way by a rare curiosity and energy. 
Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, 
occupying quarters, not far off, above a baker's 
shop on a Terrace — a group of objects still un- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 305 

touched by time — where we occasionally by way 
of change attended for our lessons and where not 
the least of our inspirations was the confidence, 
again and again justified, that our mid-morning 
*' break" would determine the appearance of a 
self-conscious stale cake, straight from below, re- 
ceived by us all each time as if it had been a 
sudden happy thought, and ushered in by a little 
girl who might have been a Dickens foundling 
or "orfling." Our being reduced to mumble cake 
in a suburban lodging by way of reaction from the 
strain of study would have been perhaps a pathetic 
picture, but we had field-days too, when we ac- 
companied our excellent friend to the Tower, the 
Thames Tunnel, St. Paul's and the Abbey, to 
say nothing of the Zoological Gardens, almost 
close at hand and with which we took in that 
age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation; 
to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then 
in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, 
the only shade on the amiability of which was 
just that gruesome association with the portal of 
the Bazaar — since Madame Tussaud had, of all 
her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the 
Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the 
Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; 
whom, for days after making their acquaintance 
(and prolonging it no further than our conscien- 
tious friend thought advisable) I half expected, 



I ; 



306 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

when alone, to meet quite dreadfully on the stair- 
case or on opening a door. All this experience 
was valuable, but it was not the languages — 
save in so far indeed as it was the English, which 
we hadn't in advance so much aimed at, yet which 
more or less, and very interestingly, came; it 
at any rate perhaps broke our fall a little that 
French, of a sort, continued to be with us in the 
remarkably erect person of Mademoiselle Cusin, 
the Swiss governess who had accompanied us from 
Geneva, whose quite sharply extrusive but on the 
whole exhilarating presence I associate with this 
winter, and who led in that longish procession of 
more or less similar domesticated presences which 
was to keep the torch, that is the accent, among 
us, fairly alight. The variety and frequency of 
the arrivals and departures of these ladies — 
whose ghostly names, again, so far as I recall 
them, I like piously to preserve, Augustine Danse, 
Amelie Fortin, Marie Guyard, Marie Bonnin- 
gue, Felicie Bonningue, Clarisse Bader — mysti- 
fies me in much the same degree as our own aca- 
demic vicissitudes in New York; I can no more 
imagine why, sociable and charitable, we so often 
changed governesses than I had contemporane- 
ously grasped the principle of our succession of 
schools: the whole group of phenomena reflected, 
I gather, as a rule, much more the extreme prompt- 
itude of the parental optimism than any dispro- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 307 

portionate habit of impatience. The optimism 
begot precipitation, and the precipitation had too 
often to confess itself. What is instructive, what 
is historic, is the probabiHty that young persons 
offering themselves at that time as guides and 
communicators — the requirements of our small 
sister were for long modest enough — quite con- 
ceivably lacked preparedness, and were so thrown 
back on the extempore, whichin turn lacked abun- 
dance. One of these figures, that of Mademoi- 
selle Danse, the most Parisian, and prodigiously 
so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly 
— a cloud of revelations succeeding her with- 
drawal; a cloud which, thick as it was, never ob- 
scured our impression of her genius and her charm. 
The daughter of a political proscript who had 
but just escaped, by the legend, being seized in 
his bed on the terrible night of the Deux-Decem- 
bre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from 
Gallipolis, Ohio, she subsequently figured to my 
imagination (in the light, that is, of the divined 
revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as 
the most brilliant and most genial of irregular 
characters, exhibiting the Parisian "mentality" 
at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and 
more remarkable for nothing than for the con- 
summate little art and grace with which she had 
for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of 
our innocent air. It was exciting, it was really 



308 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

valuable, to have to that extent rubbed shoulders 
with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for 
the adventuress there might on occasion be much 
to be said. 

Those, however, were later things — extensions 
of view hampered for the present, as I have noted, 
by our mere London street-scenery, which had 
much to build out for us. I see again that we 
but endlessly walked and endlessly daubed, and 
that our walks, with an obsession of their own, 
constantly abetted our daubing. We knew no 
other boys at all, and we even saw no others, I 
seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones, 
rude with a kind of mediseval rudeness for which 
our clear New York experience had given us no 
precedent, and of which the great and constant 
sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced 
in them, on our public appearances, by the alien 
stamp in us that, for our comfort, we vainly sought 
to dissimulate. We conformed in each particular, 
so far as we could, to the prevailing fashion and 
standard, of a narrow range in those days, but in 
our very plumage — putting our ramage aside — 
our wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, 
so sharply we challenged, when abroad, the at- 
tention of our native contemporaries, and even 
sometimes of their elders, pulled up at sight of 
us in the from-head-to-foot stare, a curiosity void 
of sympathy and that attached itself for some 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 309 

reason especially to our feet, which were not ab- 
normally large. The London people had for 
themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of 
type; we found it in particular a world of cos- 
tume, often of very odd costume — the most inti- 
mate notes of which were the postmen in their 
frock-coats of military red and their black beaver 
hats; the milkwomen, in hats that often emulated 
these, in little shawls and strange short, full 
frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails 
swung from their shoulders on wooden yokes ; the 
inveterate footmen hooked behind the coaches of 
the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, 
together with the mounted and belted grooms 
without the attendance of whom riders, of which- 
ever sex — and riders then were much more nu- 
merous — almost never went forth. The range 
of character, on the other hand, reached rather 
dreadfully down; there were embodied and exem- 
plified "horrors" in the streets beside which any 
present exhibition is pale, and I well remember 
the almost terrified sense of their salience pro- 
duced in me a couple of years later, on the occa- 
sion of a flying return from the Continent with 
my father, by a long, an interminable drive west- 
ward from the London Bridge railway-station. 
It was a soft June evening, with a lingering light 
and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, 
of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's 



310 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

Artful Dodger and his Bill Sikes and his Nancy, 
only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed 
upon the cab, the early- Victorian fourwheeler, as 
we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in 
more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, 
culminating, somewhere far to the west, in the 
vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a 
woman reeling backward as a man felled her to 
the ground with a blow in the face. The London 
view at large had in fact more than a Cruikshank, 
there still survived in it quite a Hogarth, side — 
which I had of course then no name for, but which 
I was so sharply to recognise on coming back 
years later that it fixed for me the veracity of 
the great pictorial chronicler. Hogarth's mark is 
even yet not wholly overlaid; though time has 
'per contra dealt with that stale servility of address 
which most expressed to our young minds the 
rich burden of a Past, the consequence of too much 
history. I liked for my own part a lot of history, 
but felt in face of certain queer old obsequiosities 
and appeals, whinings and sidlings and hand- 
rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play 
of apology and humility, behind which the great 
dim social complexity seemed to mass itself, that 
one didn't quite want so inordinate a quantity. 
Of that particular light and shade, however, the 
big broom of change has swept the scene bare; 
more history still has been after all what it wanted. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 311 

Quite another order, in the whole connection, 
strikes me as reigning to-day — though not with- 
out the reminder from it that the relations in 
which manner, as a generalised thing, in which 
*'tone," is ^positively pleasant, is really assured and 
sound, clear and interesting, are numerous and 
definite only when it has had in its past some 
strange phases and much misadventure. 



XXIII 

WE were still being but vaguely "formed," 
yet it was a vagueness preferred appa- 
rently by our parents to the only definite- 
ness in any degree open to us, that of the English 
school away from home (the London private school 
near home they would absolutely none of;) which 
they saw as a fearful and wonderful, though seem- 
ingly effective, preparation of the young for Eng- 
lish life and an English career, but related to that 
situation only, so little related in fact to any other 
as to make it, in a differing case, an educational 
cul-de-sac, the worst of economies. They had 
doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other 
method for boys was so splendidly general, but 
they had, I judge, their own sense of the matter 
— which would have been that it all depended on 
what was meant by this. The truth was, above 
all, that to them the formative forces most closely 
bearing on us were not in the least vague, but 
very definite by their measure and intention; there 
were " advantages,*' generally much belauded, that 
appealed to them scantly, and other matters, 
conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, 
values, importances, enjoying no great common 

312 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 313 

credit but for which it was their beHef that they, 
under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. 
In respect of which I further remind myseH of 
the blest fewness, as yet, of our years; and I come 
back to my own sense, benighted though it may 
have been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably 
active life. I recognise our immediate, our practi- 
cal ferment even in our decent perambulations, 
our discussions, W. J.'s and mine, of whether we 
had in a given case best apply for a renewal of 
our '* artists' materials" to Messrs. Rowney or to 
Messrs. Windsor and Newton, and in our pious 
resort, on these determinations, to Rathbone 
Place, more beset by our steps, probably, than 
any other single corner of the town, and the short 
but charged vista of which lives for me again in 
the tempered light of those old winter afternoons. 
Of scarce less moment than these were our fre- 
quent visits, in the same general connection, to the 
old Pantheon of Oxford Street, now fallen from 
its high estate, but during that age a place of fine 
rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an oppor- 
tunity, at the end of long walks, for the consump- 
tion of buns and ginger-beer, and above all a monu- 
ment to the genius of that wonderful painter B. R. 
Haydon. We must at one time quite have 
haunted the Pantheon, where we doubtless could 
better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to 
ruminative rest: Hay don's huge canvases covered 



314 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the walls — I wonder what has become now of 
The Banishment of Aristides, attended to the city 
gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure 
in which, especially that of the foreshortened boy 
picking up stones to shy at the ail-too- just, stares 
out at me still. We found in these works remark- 
able interest and beauty, the reason of which was 
partly, no doubt, that we hung, to fascination, at 
home, over the three volumes of the hapless ar- 
tist's Autobiography, then a new book, which our 
father, indulgent to our preoccupation, had pro- 
vided us with; but I blush to risk the further 
surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the 
classic, in Haydon, came home to us more warmly 
and humanly than in the masters commended as 
"old," who, at the National Gallery, seemed to 
meet us so little half-way, to hold out the hand of 
fellowship or suggest something that we could do, 
or could at least want to. The beauty of Haydon 
was just that he was new, shiningly new, and if 
he hinted that we might perhaps in some happy 
future emulate his big bravery there was nothing 
so impossible about it. If we adored daubing we 
preferred it fresh, and the genius of the Pantheon 
was fresh, whereas, strange to say, Rubens and 
Titian were not. Even the charm of the Pan- 
theon yielded, however, to that of the English 
collection, the Vernon bequest to the nation, then 
arrayed at Marlborough House and to which the 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 315 

great plumed and draped and dusty funeral car 
of the Duke of Wellington formed an attractive 
adjunct. The ground-floor chambers there, none 
of them at that time royally inhabited, come back 
to me as altogether bleak and bare and as owing 
their only dignity to Maclise, Mulready and Land- 
seer, to David Wilkie and Charles Leslie. They 
were, by some deep-seated English mystery, the 
real unattainable, just as they were none the less 
the directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. 
I could never have enough of Maclise's Play- 
scene in Hamlet, which I supposed the finest com- 
position in the world (though Ophelia did look a 
little as if cut in silhouette out of white paper and 
pasted on;) while as I gazed, and gazed again, at 
Leslie's Sancho Panza and his Duchess I pushed 
through the great hall of romance to the central 
or private apartments. Trafalgar Square had its 
straight message for us only in the May-time ex- 
hibition, the Royal Academy of those days having, 
without a home of its own, to borrow space from 
the National Gallery — space partly occupied, in 
the summer of 1856, by the first fresh fruits of 
the Pre-Raphaelite efflorescence, among which I 
distinguish Millais's Vale of Rest, his Autumn 
Leaves and, if I am not mistaken, his prodigious 
Blind Girl. The very word Pre-Raphaelite wore 
for us that intensity of meaning, not less than of 
mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but for 



316 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and 
I may perhaps somewhat mix the order of our 
great httle passages of perception. Momentous 
to us again was to be the Academy show of 1858^ 
where there were, from the same wide source, still 
other challenges to wonder, Holman Hunt's Scape- 
goat most of all, which I remember finding so 
charged with the awful that I was glad I saw it 
in company — it in company and I the same : I 
believed, or tried to believe, I should have feared 
to face it all alone in a room. By that time more- 
over — I mean by 1858 — we had been more fully 
indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with 
W. J., for whom, in Paris, during the winter of 
1857, instruction at the atelier of M. Leon Coig- 
niet, of a limited order and adapted to his years, 
had been candidly provided — that M. Leon Coig- 
niet whose Marius meditating among the Ruins 
of Carthage impressed us the more, at the Luxem- 
bourg (even more haunted by us in due course 
than the Pantheon had been,) in consequence of 
this family connection. 

Let me not, however, nip the present thread of 
our aesthetic evolution without a glance at that 
comparatively spare but deeply appreciated ex- 
perience of the London theatric privilege which, 
so far as occasion favoured us, ^ also pressed the 
easy spring. The New York familiarities had to 
drop; going to the play presented itself in Lon- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 317 

don as a serious, ponderous business: a proces- 
sion of two throbbing and heaving cabs over vast 
foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement 
in advance and with a renewal of far peregrina- 
tion, through twisting passages and catacombs, 
even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat 
in strange places, with still stranger ones be- 
hind or beside; we felt walls and partitions, in our 
rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house 
was to burst into flame; I recall in especial our 
being arrayed, to the number of nine persons, all 
of our contingent, in a sort of rustic balcony or 
verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a 
Swiss cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature 
of Mr. Albert Smith's once-famous representation 
of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded, rat- 
tling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again 
charms my senses, though subject to the reflec- 
tion that his type and presence, superficially so 
important, so ample, were somehow at odds with 
such ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his 
performance — a performance one of the great 
effects of which was, as I remember it, the very 
brief stop and re-departure of the train at Epernay, 
with the ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, 
the cries of travellers, the slamming of doors and 
the tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne- 
cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. 
Smith's mere personal resources and graces. But 



318 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

it is the publicity of our situation as a happy 
family that I best remember, and how, to our em- 
barrassment, we seemed put forward in our illus- 
trative chalet as part of the boisterous show and 
of what had been paid for by the house. Two 
other great evenings stand out for me as not less 
collectively enjoyed, one of these at the Prin- 
cess's, then under the management of Charles 
Kean, the unprecedented (as he was held) Shake- 
spearean revivalist, the other at the Olympic, where 
Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short- 
lived Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. 
Stirling were the high attraction. Our enjoyment 
of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry the 
Eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our 
lives: we did nothing for weeks afterwards but 
try to reproduce in water-colours Queen Kath- 
arine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling 
angels, a radiant group let down from the skies 
by machinery then thought marvellous — when 
indeed we were not parading across our school- 
room stage as the portentous Cardinal and impres- 
sively alternating his last speech to Cromwell with 
Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address 
on the way to the scaffold. The spectacle had 
seemed to us prodigious — as it was doubtless at 
its time the last word of costly scenic science; 
though as I look back from the high ground of an 
age that has mastered tone and fusion I seem to 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 319 

see it as comparatively garish and violent, after 
the manner of the complacently approved stained- 
glass church-windows of the same period. I was 
to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed 
later on — ten years later, in America — without 
a rag of scenic reinforcement; when I was struck 
with the fact that no actor so little graced by na- 
ture probably ever went so far toward repairing 
it by a kind of cold rage of endeavour. Were he 
and his wife really not coercively interesting on 
that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't 
their art a distinction that triumphed over bat- 
tered age and sorry harshness, or was I but too 
easily beguiled by the old association? I have 
enjoyed and forgotten numberless rich hours of 
spectatorship, but somehow still find hooked to 
the wall of memory the picture of this hushed 
couple in the castle court, with the knocking at 
the gate, with Macbeth's stare of pitiful horror 
at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, 
up to the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's 
coldly portentous snatch of them. What I es- 
pecially owe that lady is my sense of what she 
had in common, as a queer hooped and hook- 
nosed figure, of large circumference and archaic 
attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those per- 
formers of the past who are preserved for us on 
the small canvases of Hogarth and Zoffany; she 
helped one back at that time of her life to a vision 



320 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

of the Mrs. Gibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards — so 
affecting may often be such recovered Hnks. 

I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself 
partaking of that antiquity, even though Still 
Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishing freshness 
and as to which I remember my fine old friend 
Fanny Kemble's mentioning to me in the distant 
after-time that she had directed Tom Taylor to 
Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the 
subject of it, passed at the moment for a highly 
modern "social study." It is perhaps in par- 
ticular through the memory of our dismal approach 
to the theatre, the squalid slum of Wych Street, 
then incredibly brutal and barbarous as an avenue 
to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled 
coach of Royalty, that the episode affects me as 
antedating some of the conditions of the mid- 
Victorian age; the general credit of which, I should 
add, was highly re-established for us by the con- 
summately quiet and natural art, as we expertly 
pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's John Mildmay 
and the breadth and sincerity of the representa- 
tive of the rash mother-in-law whom he so imper- 
turbably puts in her place. This was an exhibi- 
tion supposed in its day to leave its spectators 
little to envy in the highest finish reached by the 
French theatre. At a remarkable height, in a 
different direction, moved the strange and vivid 
little genius of Robson, a master of fantastic in- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 321 

tensity, unforgettable for us, we felt that night, 
in Planche's extravaganza of The Discreet Prin- 
cess, a Christmas production preluding to the im- 
memorial harlequinade. I still see Robson slide 
across the stage, in one sidelong wriggle, as the 
small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy- 
tale, everything he did at once very dreadful and 
very droll, thoroughly true and yet none the less 
macabre, the great point of it all its parody of 
Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision 
filled out a couple of years further on by his Daddy 
Hardacre in a two-acts version of a Parisian piece 
thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's 
Eugenie Grandet. This occasion must have given 
the real and the finer measure of his highly origi- 
nal talent; so present to me, despite the interval, 
is the distinctiveness of his little concentrated 
rustic miser whose daughter helps herself from his 
money-box so that her cousin and lover shall save 
a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bank- 
ruptcy; and the prodigious effect of Robson's 
appalled descent, from an upper floor, his literal 
headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep 
staircase occupying the centre of the stage, on his 
discovery of the rifling of his chest. Long was I 
to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his 
alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder 
and rage as his impetus hurled him, a prostrate 
scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so 



322 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

held the stage" that in his company you could see 
nobody else) half way across the room. I asso- 
ciate a little uncertainly with the same night the 
sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and 
in a comedy botched from the French, like every- 
thing else in those days that was not either Sheri- 
dan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an 
example above all, this association, of the heaped 
measure of the old bills — vast and various enu- 
merations as they were, of the size of but slightly 
reduced placards and with a strange and delight- 
ful greasy feel and redolence of printer's ink, in- 
tensely theatrical ink somehow, in their big black 
lettering. Charles Matthews must have been 
then in his mid-career, and him too, wasted and 
aged, infinitely "marked," I was to see again, 
ever so long after, in America; an impression re- 
minding me, as I recover it, of how one took his 
talent so thoroughly for granted that he seemed 
somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at 
least in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," 
which were on a footing, and no very interesting 
one, of their own. The other effect, that of a 
naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly 
and intimate, that one's relation with the artist 
lost itseM in one's relation with the character, the 
artist thereby somehow positively suffering while 
the character gained, or at least while the spec- 
tator did — this comes back to me quite as a part 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 323 

even of my earlier experience and as attesting 
on behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since 
there are no more charming artistic cases than 
those of the frank result, when it is frank enough, 
and the dissimulated process, when the dissimula- 
tion has been deep. To drop, or appear to drop, 
machinery and yet keep, or at least gain, intensity, 
the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from 
a mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, 
is really to do something. In spite of which, at 
the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by 
the light of the present, of the sense of that big 
and rather dusky night of Drury Lane is not so 
much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact 
that personality and artistry, with their intensity, 
could work their spell in such a material desert, 
in conditions intrinsically so charmless, so bleak 
and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what 
we regard to-day as most indispensable — since 
our present fine conception is but to reduce and 
fill in the material desert, to people and carpet and 
curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, 
but our predecessors were, with their eye on the 
essence, not wrong; thanks to which they wear 
the crown of our now thinking of them — if we 
do think of them — as in their way giants and 
heroes. What their successors were to become is 
another question; very much better dressed, be- 
yond all doubt. 



XXIV 



GOOD Robert Thompson was followed by 
fin M. Lerambert — who was surely good 
too, in his different way; good at least for 
feigning an interest he could scarce have rejoic- 
ingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to 
give a due impression of: that artifice being, as 
we must dimly have divined at the time (in fact 
I make bold to say that I personally did divine 
it,) exactly a sign of his finesse. Of no such un- 
canny engine had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known 
a need — luckily since to what arsenal could he 
possibly have resorted for it? None capable of 
supplying it could ever have met his sight, and 
we ourselves should at a pinch have had to help 
him toward it. He was easily interested, or at 
least took an easy view, on such ground as we 
offered him, of what it was to be so; whereas 
his successor attached to the condition a dif- 
ferent value — one recognising no secondary sub- 
stitute. Perhaps this was why our connection 
with M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or 
five months — time even for his sharp subterfuge 
to have ceased entirely to serve him; though 
indeed even as I say this I vaguely recall that our 

324 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 325 

separation was attended with friction, that it took 
him unaware and that he had been prepared (or 
so represented himseK) for further sacrifices. It 
could have been no great one, assuredly, to deal 
with so intensely living a young mind as my elder 
brother's, it could have been but a happy im- 
pression constantly renewed; but we two juniors, 
Wilky and I, were a drag — Wilky's powers most 
displayed at that time in his preference for in- 
genuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, 
and my own aptitude showing for nil, according 
to our poor gentleman's report of me when a 
couple of months had sped, save as to rendering 
La Fontaine's fables into English with a certain 
corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember per- 
fectly the parental communication to me of this 
fell judgment, I remember as well the interest with 
which its so quite definite character inspired me 
— that character had such beauty and distinct- 
ness; yet, and ever so strangely, I recover no 
sense of having been crushed, and this even though 
destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The 
fact leaves me at a loss, since I also remember my 
not having myseK thought particularly well, in the 
connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty. 
"Oh," I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were 
to be, if it only could be, really a question of 
rendering — !" and so, without confusion, though in 
vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: 



326 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

as if so many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would 
have to change and operate, so many would have 
to happen, so much water have to flow under the 
bridge, before I could give primary application 
to such a thought, much more finish such a sen- 
tence. 

All of which is but a way of saying that we 
had since the beginning of the summer settled 
ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert — by 
what agency invoked, by what revelation vouch- 
safed, I quite forget — was at this time attending 
us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that, 
between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colisee, 
hung, at no great height, over the Avenue des 
Champs-Elysees; hung, that is, from the vantage 
of its own considerable terrace, surmounted as 
the parapet of the latter was with iron railings 
rising sufficiently to protect the place for familiar 
use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly 
used it,) and yet not to the point of fencing out 
life. A blest little old-world refuge it must have 
seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and 
peculiarly resonant small court and idle communs 
beside it, accessible by a high grille where the 
jangle of the bell and the clatter of response across 
the stones might have figured a comprehensive 
echo of all old Paris. Old Paris then even there 
considerably lingered; I recapture much of its 
presence, for that matter, within our odd relic of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 327 

a house, the property of an American southerner 
from whom our parents had briefly hired it and 
who appeared to divide his time, poor unadmon- 
ished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, 
between Louisiana and France. What association 
could have breathed more from the queer graces 
and the queer incommodities alike, from the dif- 
fused glassy polish of floor and perilous staircase, 
from the redundancy of mirror and clock and 
ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the 
white and gold panel, from that merciless ele- 
gance of tense red damask, above all, which made 
the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sump- 
tuous, no doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the 
brocaded walls? It was amid these refinements 
that we presently resumed our studies — even 
explicitly far from arduous at first, as the Champs- 
Elysees were perforce that year our summer habi- 
tation and some deference was due to the place 
and the season, lessons of any sort being at best 
an infraction of the latter. M. Lerambert, who 
was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, 
pale and prominently intellectual, who lived in 
the Rue Jacob with his mother and sister, exactly 
as he should have done to accentuate propheti- 
cally his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to 
some hero of Victor Cherbuliez, and who, in fine, 
was conscious, not unimpressively, of his author- 
ship of a volume of meditative verse sympatheti- 



328 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

cally mentioned by the Sainte-Beuve of the Caus- 
eries in a review of the young poets of the hour 
("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too 
has suffered, M. Lerambert too has sung!" or 
words to that effect :) this subtle personality, really 
a high form of sensibility I surmise, and as quali- 
fied for other and intenser relations as any Cher- 
buliez figure of them all, was naturally not to be 
counted on to lead us gapingly forth as good Mr. 
Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of 
warm somniferous mornings by the windows that 
opened to the clattery, plashy court is quite, so 
far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken. 

The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me 
shamelessly different, for our circle had promptly 
been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing 
Mademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flex- 
ible taille and the so salient smiling eyes, than 
which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that 
other epic governess, were not more pleasingly 
green; who provided with high efficiency for our 
immediate looser needs — mine and Wilky's and 
those of our small brother Bob (I'ingenieux petit 
Robertson as she was to dub him,) and of our still 
smaller sister at least — our first fine fldneries of 
curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had 
been bequeathed by us in London to a higher 
sphere than service with mere earnest nomads 
could represent; but had left us clinging and weep- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 329 

ing and was for a long time afterwards to write to 
us, faithfully, in the most beautiful copper-plate 
hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with details 
that brought home to us as we had never known 
it brought the material and institutional difference 
between the nomadic and the sohdly, the spread- 
ingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occa- 
sion of our being again for a while in London, she 
hastened to call on us, and, on departing, amiably 
invited me to walk back with her, for a gossip — 
it was a bustling day of June — across a long 
stretch of the town; when I left her at a glitter- 
ing portal with the impression of my having in 
our transit seen much of Society (the old London 
"season" filled the measure, had length and 
breadth and thickness, to an extent now foregone,) 
and, more particularly, achieved a small psycho- 
logic study, noted the action of the massive Eng- 
lish machinery directed to its end, which had been 
in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous 
and "work over" the crude. I remember on that 
occasion retracing my steps from Eaton Square 
to Devonshire Street with a lively sense of obser- 
vation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of 
golden straws. Our guide and philosopher of the 
summer days in Paris was no such character as 
that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and 
consummate, fortunately for the case altogether 
— as our mere candid humanity would otherwise 



330 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thack- 
eray's novel contains a plate from his own ex- 
pressive hand representing Miss Sharp lost in a 
cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are 
locked in a scrimmage on the floor; but the mar- 
vel of our exemplar of the Becky type was exactly 
that though her larger, her more interested and 
sophisticated views had a range that she not only 
permitted us to guess but agreeably invited us to 
follow almost to their furthest limits, we never for 
a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. 
We might, we must, so tremendously have bored 
her, but no ironic artist could have caught her at 
any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I 
imagine, because her own ironies would have been 
too fine for him and too numerous and too mixed. 
And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all in- 
formation for the free enjoyment — on the terms 
proper to our tender years — of her beautiful city. 
It was not by the common measure then so beauti- 
ful as now; the second Empire, too lately installed, 
was still more or less feeling its way, with the 
great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Hauss- 
mann marked as yet but in the light preliminary 
flourish. Its connections with the past, however, 
still hung thickly on; its majesties and symme- 
tries, comparatively vague and general, were sub- 
ject to the happy accident, the charming lapse and 
the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance compo- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 331 

sition and colour now quite purged away. The 
whole region of the Champs-Ely sees, where we 
must after all at first have principally prowled, 
was another w^orld from the actual huge centre of 
repeated radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we 
of course already thought it, carried the eye from 
the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places 
abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces 
and hotels of another time, pavilions still braver 
than ours, cabarets and cafes of homely, almost 
of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather 
dusty ruralism, spreading away to the River and 
the Wood. What was the Jardin d'Hiver, a place 
of entertainment standing quite over against us 
and that looped itself at night with little coloured 
oil-lamps, a mere twinkling grin upon the face of 
pleasure? Dim my impression of having been ad- 
mitted — or rather, I suppose, conducted, though 
under conductorship now vague to me — to view 
it by colourless day, when it must have worn the 
stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots." 
More distinct on the other hand the image of the 
bustling barriere at the top of the Avenue, on 
the hither side of the Arch, where the old loose-girt 
banlieue began at once and the two matched 
lodges of the octroi, highly, that is expressly even 
if humbly, architectural, guarded the entrance, on 
either side, with such a suggestion of the genera- 
tions and dynasties and armies, the revolutions 



332 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

and restorations they had seen come and go. But 
the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much more 
thinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been 
traced, as the Empress herself, young, more than 
young, attestedly and agreeably new, and fair and 
shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly 
on exhibition; with the thrill of that surpassed 
for us, however, by the incomparable passage, as 
we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne 
forth for his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud 
in the splendid coach that gave a glimpse of ap- 
pointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, 
and beside which the cent-gardes, all light-blue 
and silver and intensely erect quick jolt, rattled 
with pistols raised and cocked. Was a public 
holiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's 
baptism at Notre Dame, the fete of Saint-Napo- 
leon, or was any ever more immortalised, as we 
say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully 
ample and vivid picture of it in the Eugene Rou- 
gon of Emile Zola, who must have taken it in, on 
the spot, as a boy of about our own number of 
years, though of so much more implanted and 
predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of that 
interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and 
waiting and shuffling in dust, in crowds, in fa- 
tigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers 
and false alarms and expectations and renewed 
reactions and rushes, all transfigured at the last. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 333 

withal, by the biggest and brightest illumination 
up to that time offered even the Parisians, the 
blinding glare of the new Empire effectually sym- 
bolised — the vision of the whole, I say, comes 
back to me quite in the form of a chapter from 
the Rougon-Macquart, with its effect of something 
long and dense and heavy, without shades or 
undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. I 
dare say that for those months our contempla- 
tions, our daily exercise in general, strayed little 
beyond the Champs-Elysees, though I recall con- 
fusedly as well certain excursions to Passy and 
Auteuil, where we foregathered with small resi- 
dent compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose 
French, an unpremeditated art, was a revelation, 
an initiation, and whence we roamed, for purposes 
of picnic, into parts of the Bois de Boulogne that, 
oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest bet- 
ter than anything at our own American door had 
done. 

It was the social aspect of our situation that 
most appealed to me, none the less — for I detect 
myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging a social 
aspect again, and more than ever, from the phe- 
nomena disclosed to my reflective gape or to other- 
wise associated strolls; perceptive passages not 
wholly independent even of the occupancy of two- 
sous chairs within the charmed circle of Guignol 
and of Gringalet. I suppose I should have blushed 
to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in 



334 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till 
evening fell, had still their spell to cast — as part 
and parcel, that is, of the general intensity of 
animation and variety of feature. The "amuse- 
ment," the aesthetic and human appeal, of Paris 
had in those days less the air of a great shining 
conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement 
confessed less to its huge purpose; but manners 
and types and traditions, the detail of the scene, 
its pointed particulars, went their way with a 
straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier 
grace — character, temper and tone had lost com- 
paratively little of their emphasis. These scat- 
tered accents were matter for our eyes and ears 
— not a little even already for our respective imag- 
inations; though it is only as the season waned 
and we set up our fireside afresh and for the 
winter that I connect my small revolution with a 
wider field and with the company of W. J. Again 
for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; 
Guignol and Gringalet failed to claim his atten- 
tion, and Mademoiselle Danse, I make out, dep- 
recated his theory of exact knowledge, besides 
thinking him perhaps a little of an ours — which 
came to the same thing. We adjourned that au- 
tumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apart- 
ment in the street then bravely known as the Rue 
d'Angouleme-St.-Honore and now, after other mu- 
tations, as the Rue La Boetie; which we were 
again to exchange a year later for an abode in the 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 335 

Rue Montaigne, this last after a summer's ab- 
sence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earHer migration 
setting up for me the frame of a considerably 
animated picture. Animated at best it was with 
the spirit and the modest facts of our family life, 
among which I number the cold finality of M. 
Lerambert, reflected in still other testimonies — 
that is till the date of our definite but respectful 
rupture with him, followed as the spring came on 
by our ineluctable phase at the Institution Fe- 
zandie in the Rue Balzac; of which latter there 
will be even more to say than I shall take freedom 
for. With the Rue d'Angouleme came extensions 
— even the mere immediate view of opposite 
intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects 
and neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius 
counting as such: our many-windowed premier, 
above an entresol of no great height, hung over 
the narrow and, during the winter months, not a 
little dusky channel, with endless movement and 
interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. What 
faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, 
at the corner, for the first — the impeccable dis- 
penser of the so softly-crusty crescent-rolls that 
we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, 
with our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of 
*' European" breakfast-bread fit to be named even 
with the feeblest of our American forms. Then 
came the small cremerie, white picked out with 



336 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

blue, which, by some secret of its own keeping, 
afforded, within the compass of a few feet square, 
prolonged savoury meals to working men, white- 
f rocked or blue-f rocked, to uniformed cabmen, 
stout or spare, but all more or less audibly bavards 
and discernibly critical; and next the compact 
embrasure of the ecaillere or oyster-lady, she and 
her paraphernalia fitted into their interstice much 
as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured 
in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as 
narrow a cage, his neat faggots and chopped logs 
stacked beside him and above him in his sentry- 
box quite as the niches of saints, in early Itahan 
pictures, are framed with tightly-packed fruits 
and flowers. Space and remembrance fail me for 
the rest of the series, the attaching note of which 
comes back as the note of diffused sociability and 
domestic, in fact more or less aesthetic, ingenuity, 
with the street a perpetual parlour or household 
centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little 
bourgeoise or ouvriere to sport, on every pretext 
and in every errand, her fluted cap, her composed 
head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which 
is to say indeed but that life and manners were 
more pointedly and harmoniously expressed, un- 
der our noses there, than we had perhaps found 
them anywhere save in the most salient passages 
of '* stories"; though I must in spite of it not 
write as if these trifles were all our fare. 



XXV 

THAT autumn renewed, I make out, our long 
and beguiled walks, my own with W. J. 
in especial; at the same time that I have 
somehow the sense of the whole more broken ap- 
peal on the part of Paris, the scanter confidence 
and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more nu- 
merous and composite, but obscurer and more 
baffled intimations. Not indeed — for all my 
brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it 
— that there was not some joy and some grasp; 
why else were we forever (as I seem to conceive 
we were) measuring the great space that separated 
us from the gallery of the Luxembourg, every step 
of which, either way we took it, fed us with some 
interesting, some admirable image, kept us in 
relation to something nobly intended? That par- 
ticular walk was not prescribed us, yet we appear 
to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysees to 
the river, and so over the nearest bridge and the 
quays of the left bank to the Rue de Seine, as if 
it somehow held the secret of our future; to the 
extent even of my more or less sneaking ojff on 
occasion to take it by myself, to taste of it with a 
due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the 

337 



338 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

finest, which could only mean the most Parisian, 
adventure. The further quays, with their in- 
numerable old bookshops and print-shops, the 
long cases of each of these commodities, exposed 
on the parapets in especial, must have come to 
know us almost as well as we knew them; with 
plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, 
however, as we mounted the long, black Rue de 
Seine — such a stretch of perspective, such an in- 
tensity of tone as it offered in those days; where 
every low-browed vitrine waylaid us and we 
moved in a world of which the dark message, 
expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister 
way too, might have been "Art, art, art, don't 
you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what that 
is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard 
as ever we could, and were fairly well at it, I 
always felt, even by the time we had passed up 
into that comparatively short but wider and finer 
vista of the Rue de Tournon, which in those days 
more abruptly crowned the more compressed ap- 
proach and served in a manner as a great outer 
vestibule to the Palace. Style, dimly described, 
looked down there, as with conscious encourage- 
ment, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, 
straight-standing old houses — very much as if 
wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune homme, 
we are dignity and memory and measure, we are 
conscience and proportion and taste, not to men- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 339 

tion strong sense too : for all of which good things 
take us — you won't find one of them when you 
find (as you're going soon to begin to at such a 
rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an abun- 
dance of remark to such young ears; but it did 
all, I maintain, tremble in the air, with the sense 
that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and a little 
grass-grown, might more or less have figured some 
fine old street de province: I cherished in short its 
very name and think I really hadn't to wait to 
prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate 
Cafe Foyot of the left hand corner, the much- 
loved and so haunted Cafe Foyot of the old Paris, 
to its — well, to its roaring successor. The wide 
mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a 
short way round the corner, had not yet been 
forced open to the exhibition of more or less glit- 
tering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the 
Palace and its gardens, which formed the right, 
the sober social antithesis to the "elegant" Tuile- 
ries, and which in fine, with these renewals of 
our young confidence, reinforced both in a gen- 
eral and in a particular way one of the fondest of 
our literary curiosities of that time, the conscien- 
tious study of Les Frangais Peints par Eux-Mlmes, 
rich in wood-cuts of Gavarni, of Grandville, of 
Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our duty 
to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity 
to copy in pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and 



340 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

double-columned octavo it was that first disclosed 
to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, 
the great name of Balzac, who, in common with 
every other "light" writer of his day, contributed 
to its pages: hadn't I pored over his exposition 
there of the contrasted types of L'Habituee des 
Tuileries and L'Habituee du Luxembourg? — find- 
ing it very serre, in fact what I didn't then know 
enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal 
and a trifle lubricated by Gavarni's two drawings, 
which had somehow so much, in general, to say. 

Let me not however dally by the way, when 
nothing, at those hours, I make out, so much 
spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within 
the Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the 
Empire, but then also forming, as with extensions 
they still and much more copiously form, the great 
Paris museum of contemporary art. This array 
was at that stage a comparatively (though only 
comparatively) small affair; in spite of which fact 
we supposed it vast and final — so that it would 
have shocked us to foreknow how in many a case, 
and of the most cherished cases, the finality was 
to break down. Most of the works of the modern 
schools that we most admired are begging their 
bread, I fear, from door to door — that is from 
one provincial museum or dim .back seat to an- 
other; though we were on much-subsequent re- 
turns to draw a long breath for the saved state 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 341 

of some of the great things as to which our faith 
had been clearest. It had been clearer for none, 
I recover, than for Couture's Romains de la De- 
cadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the 
last word of the grand manner, but of the grand 
manner modernised, humanised, philosophised, re- 
deemed from academic death; so that it was to 
this master's school that the young American con- 
temporary flutter taught its wings to fly straight- 
est, and that I could never, in the long aftertime, 
face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and 
marvels without a rush of memories and a stir of 
ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of 
genius, the *' Boston painter" whose authority 
was greatest during the thirty years from 1857 or 
so, and with whom for a time in the early period 
W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged 
his studies in Paris under the inspiration of Cou- 
ture and of Edouard Frere; masters in a group 
completed by three or four of the so finely inter- 
esting landscapists of that and the directly pre- 
vious age, Troyon, Rousseau, Daubigny, even 
Lambinet and others, and which summed up for 
the American collector and in the New York and 
Boston markets the idea of the modern in the 
masterly. It was a comfortable time — when ap- 
preciation could go so straight, could rise, and 
rise higher, without critical contortions; when we 
could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so 



342 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

"quiet." We were in our immediate circle to 
know Couture himself a little toward the end of 
his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where 
he had picked up the aesthetic hint for the beauti- 
ful Page with a Falcon, if I have the designation 
right, his other great bid for style and capture of 
it — which we were long to continue to suppose 
perhaps the rarest of all modern pictures. The 
feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean 
as a conception; no mystery hung about them — ■ 
in the sense of one's asking one's self whence they 
had come and by what romantic or roundabout 
or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of 
the poetic shaken out as from strong wings when 
great presences, in any one of the arts, appear to 
alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of 
the splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin 
or whatever who, while he mounts the marble 
staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefin- 
ger with a grace that shows him off, was that it 
failed to help us to divine, during that after-lapse 
of the glory of which I speak, by v/hat rare chance, 
for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the 
heavens had once opened. Poetry had swooped 
down, breathed on him for an hour and fled. Such 
at any rate are the see-saws of reputations — 
which it contributes to the interes.t of any observa- 
tional lingering on this planet to have caught so 
repeatedly in their weird motion; the question of 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 343 

what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular 
cases, before that motion sinks to rest, whether at 
the up or at the down end, being really a bribe to 
one's own non-departure. Especially great the 
interest of having noted all the rises and falls and 
of being able to compare the final point — so far 
as any certainty may go as to that — either with 
the greatest or the least previous altitudes; since 
it is only when there have been exaltations (which 
is what is not commonest), that our attention is 
most rewarded. 

If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for 
Eugene Delacroix, our next young admiration, 
though much more intelligently my brother's than 
mine, that had already taken place and settled, 
for we were to go on seeing him, and to the end, 
in firm possession of his crown, and to take even, 
I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having 
from so far back been sure of it. I was sure of it, 
I must properly add, but as an effect of my 
brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remem- 
ber, have been as sure of Paul Delaroche — for 
whom the pendulum was at last to be arrested at 
a very different point. I could see in a manner, 
for all the queerness, what W. J. meant by that 
beauty and, above all, that living interest in La 
Barque du Dante, where the queerness, accord- 
ing to him, was perhaps what contributed most; 
see it doubtless in particular when he reproduced 



344 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

the work, at home, from a memory aided by a 
Uthograph. Yet Les Enfants d'Edouard thrilled 
me to a different tune, and I couldn't doubt that 
the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad 
and sore and sick, with his wide crimped side- 
locks of fair hair and his violet legs marked by the 
Garter and dangling from the bed, was a recon- 
stitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most 
"last word" modern or psychologic kind. I had 
never heard of psychology in art or anywhere else 

— scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the 
nameless force at play. Thus if I also in my way 
"subtly" admired, one's noted practice of that 
virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice) 
would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, 
under such encouragements, once for all; and I 
can surely have enjoyed up to then no formal ex- 
hibition of anything as I at one of those seasons 
enjoyed the commemorative show of Delaroche 
given, soon after his death, in one of the rather 
bleak salles of the Ecole des Beaux- Arts to which 
access was had from the quay. There was recon- 
stituted history if one would, in the straw-littered 
scaffold, the distracted ladies with three-cornered 
coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that 
made them look as if they had bath-towels over 
their arms; in the block, the headsman, the ban- 
daged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey 

— not less than in the noble indifference of Charles 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 345 

the First, compromised king but perfect gentle- 
man, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as if 
on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult 
and badger him: the thrill of which was all the 
greater from its pertaining to that English lore 
which the good Robert Thompson had, to my 
responsive delight, rubbed into us more than any- 
thing else and all from a fine old conservative 
and monarchical point of view. Yet of these 
things W. J. attempted no reproduction, though 
I remember his repeatedly laying his hand on 
Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere 
interesting — to the point of trying effects, with 
charcoal and crayon, in his manner; and not less 
in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as 
more or less of a genius of the same rare family. 
They were touched with the ineffable, the in- 
scrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the in- 
calculable; categories these toward which we had 
even then, by a happy transition, begun to yearn 
and languish. We were not yet aware of style, 
though on the way to become so, but were aware 
of mystery, which indeed was one of its forms — 
while we saw all the others, without exception, 
exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply 
overwhelmed and bewildered me. 

It was as if they had gathered there into a vast 
deafening chorus ; I shall never forget how — 
speaking, that is, for my own sense — they filled 



346 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

those vast halls with the influence rather of some 
complicated sound, diffused and reverberant, than 
of such visibilities as one could directly deal with. 
To distinguish among these, in the charged and 
coloured and confounding air, was difficult — it 
discouraged and defied; which was doubtless why 
my impression originally best entertained was that 
of those magnificent parts of the great gallery 
simply not inviting us to distinguish. They only 
arched over us in the wonder of their endless 
golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in 
perpetual revolution, breaking into great high- 
hung circles and symmetries of squandered pic- 
ture, opening into deep outward embrasures that 
threw off the rest of monumental Paris somehow 
as a told story, a sort of wrought effect or bold 
ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at 
every point, as a vast bright gage, even at mo- 
ments a felt adventure, of experience. This comes 
to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself 
most happily cross that bridge over to Style 
constituted by the wondrous Galerie d'ApoUon, 
drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation 
and seeming to form with its supreme coved ceil- 
ing and inordinately shining parquet a prodigious 
tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by 
little, that is again and again, ,a general sense of 
glory. The glory meant ever so many things at 
once, not only beauty and art and supreme de- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 347 

sign, but history and fame and power, the world 
in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression. 
The world there was at the same time, by an odd 
extension or intensification, the local present fact, 
to my small imagination, of the Second Empire, 
which was (for my notified consciousness) new and 
queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot 
so amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, 
took under its protection with a splendour of inso- 
lence, the state and ancientry of the whole scene, 
profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, con- 
fusedly though it might be, by the unparalleled 
luxury and variety of its heritage. But who shall 
count the sources at which an intense young fancy 
(when a young fancy is intense) capriciously, ab- 
surdly drinks? — so that the effect is, in twenty 
connections, that of a love-philtre or fear-philtre 
which fixes for the senses their supreme symbol of 
the fair or the strange. The Galerie d'Apollon 
became for years what I can only term a splendid 
scene of things, even of the quite irrelevant or, 
as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to 
this hour, with the last vividness, what a precious 
part it played for me, and exactly by that conti- 
nuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer 
dawn many years later, to the fortunate, the 
instantaneous recovery and capture of the most 
appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my 
life. The climax of this extraordinary experience 



348 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

— which stands alone for me as a dream-adven- 
ture founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act 
of cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life- 
saving energy, as well as in unutterable fear — 
was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, 
along a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried 
figure that retreated in terror before my rush and 
dash (a glare of inspired reaction from irresist- 
ible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had 
a moment before been desperately, and all the 
more abjectly, defending by the push of my shoul- 
der against hard pressure on lock and bar from 
the other side. The lucidity, not to say the sub- 
limity, of the crisis had consisted of the great 
thought that I, in my appalled state, was prob- 
ably still more appalling than the awful agent, 
creature or presence, whatever he was, whom I 
had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from 
sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be making 
for my place of rest. The triumph of my impulse, 
perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at 
a bound, forcing the door outward, was the grand 
thing, but the great point of the whole was the 
wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dis- 
mayed, the tables turned upon him by my so sur- 
passing him for straight aggression and dire inten- 
tion, my visitant was already but a diminished 
spot in the long perspective, the tremendous, 
glorious hall, as I say, over the far-gleaming floor 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 349 

of which, cleared for the occasion of its great Hne 
of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for 
his life, while a great storm of thunder and light- 
ning played through the deep embrasures of high 
windows at the right. The lightning that re- 
vealed the retreat revealed also the wondrous 
place and, by the same amazing play, my young 
imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of 
which, deep within me, had kept it whole, pre- 
served it to this thrilling use; for what in the 
world were the deep embrasures and the so pol- 
ished floor but those of the Galerie d'Apollon of 
my childhood? The "scene of something" I had 
vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was 
to be the scene of that immense hallucination. 

Of what, at the same time, in those years, were 
the great rooms of the Louvre almost equally, 
above and below, not the scene, from the moment 
they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our percep- 
tions? — literally on almost all of these, in one 
way and another; quite in such a manner, I more 
and more see, as to have been educative, forma- 
tive, fertilising, in a degree which no other "in- 
tellectual experience" our youth was to know 
could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive 
thing, to rival. The sharp and strange, the quite 
heart-shaking little prevision had come to me, for 
myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very 
first visit of all, my brother's and mine, under 



350 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

conduct of the good Jean Nadali, before-men- 
tioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the 
Rue de la Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival 
in Paris (July 1855) and while they were other- 
wise concerned. I hang again, appalled but up- 
lifted, on brave Nadali's arm — his professional 
acquaintance with the splendours about us added 
for me on the spot to the charm of his "European" 
character: I cling to him while I gape at Geri- 
cault's Radeau de la Meduse, the sensation, for 
splendour and terror of interest, of that juncture 
to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along 
with two or three other more or less contemporary 
products, Guerin's Burial of Atala, Prudhon's 
Cupid and Psyche, David's helmetted Romanisms, 
Madame Vigee-Lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of 
herself and her little girl, with how can I say what 
foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the 
hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, con- 
fusedly speaking, that one was going to have, and 
the kind of life, always of the queer so-called in- 
ward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way 
— though that description didn't then wait upon 
it, that one was going to lead. It came of itself, 
this almost awful apprehension in all the pres- 
ences, under our courier's protection and in my 
brother's company — it came just there and so; 
there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. 
The bliss in fact I think scarce disengaged itself 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 351 

at all, but only the sense of a freedom of contact 
and appreciation really too big for one, and leav- 
ing such a mark on the very place, the pictures, 
the frames themselves, the figures within them, 
the particular parts and features of each, the look 
of the rich light, the smell of the massively en- 
closed air, that I have never since renewed the old 
exposure without renewing again the old emotion 
and taking up the small scared consciousness. 
That, with so many of the conditions repeated, is 
the charm — to feel afresh the beginning of so 
much that was to be. The beginning in short 
was with Gericault and David, but it went on and 
on and slowly spread; so that one's stretched, 
one's even strained, perceptions, one's discoveries 
and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the 
great premises, almost as so many explorations 
of the house of life, so many circlings and hover- 
ings round the image of the world. I have dim 
reminiscences of permitted independent visits, 
uncorrectedly juvenile though I might still be, 
during which the house of life and the palace of 
art became so mixed and interchangeable — the 
Louvre being, under a general description, the 
most peopled of all scenes not less than the most 
hushed of all temples — that an excursion to look 
at pictures would have but half expressed my af- 
ternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked and 
looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's 



352 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

moon-borne Madonna, at Leonardo's almost un- 
holy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the 
Salon Carre as that display was then composed; 
but I had also looked at France and looked at 
Europe, looked even at America as Europe itself 
might be conceived so to look, looked at history, 
as a still-felt past and a complacently personal 
future, at society, manners, types, characters, pos- 
sibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts ; 
and all in the light of being splendidly "on my 
own," as I supposed it, though we hadn't then 
that perfection of slang, and of (in especial) going 
and coming along that interminable and incom- 
parable Seine-side front of the Palace against 
which young sensibility felt itself almost rub, for 
endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the 
friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such 
were at any rate some of the vague processes — I 
see for how utterly vague they must show — of 
picking up an education; and I was, in spite of 
the vagueness, so far from agreeing with my 
brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and 
that that never is done, in any sense not negli- 
gible, and also that an education might, or should, 
in particular, have picked us up, and yet didn't 
— I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I 
quite came to glorify such passages and see them 
as part of an order really fortunate. If we had 
been little asses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 353 

intention driving us wouldn't have made us less 
so — to any point worth mentioning; and as we 
extracted such impressions, to put it at the worst, 
from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and 
Luxembourgs nothing better) why we weren't lit- 
tle asses, but something wholly other: which ap- 
peared all I needed to contend for. Above all 
it would have been stupid and ignoble, an attested 
and lasting dishonour, not, with our chance, to 
have followed our straggling clues, as many as we 
could and disengaging as we happily did, I felt, 
the gold and the silver ones, whatever the others 
might have been — not to have followed them and 
not to have arrived by them, so far as we were to 
arrive. Instinctively, for any dim designs we 
might have nourished, we picked out the silver 
and the gold, attenuated threads though they 
must have been, and I positively feel that there 
were more of these, far more, casually interwoven, 
than will reward any present patience for my un- 
ravelling of the too fine tissue. 



XXVI 

I ALLUDE of course in particular here to the 
aesthetic clue in general, with which it was 
that we most (or that I at any rate most) 
fumbled, without our in the least having then, as 
I have already noted, any such rare name for it. 
There were sides on which it fairly dangled about 
us, involving our small steps and wits; though 
others too where I could, for my own part, but 
clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the 
theatre for instance, which had played such a 
part for us at home, almost wholly dropped in 
just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed 
half explained by the fact that life in general, all 
round us, was perceptibly more theatrical. And 
there were other reasons, whether definitely set 
before us or not, which we grasped in proportion 
as we gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the 
French drama, great, strange and important, was 
as much out of relation to our time of life, our so 
little native strain and our cultivated innocence, 
as the American and English had been directly 
addressed to them. To the Cirque d'Ete, the 
Cirque d'Hiver, the Theatre du' Cirque, we were 
on occasion conducted — we had fallen so to the 
level of circuses, and that name appeared a safety; 

354 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 355 

in addition to which the big theatre most bravely 
bearing it, the especial home at that time of the 
glittering and multitudinous feerie, did seem to 
lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes, into 
a higher sphere of light and grace than any pre- 
viously disclosed. I recall Le Diable d'Argent as 
in particular a radiant revelation — kept before 
us a whole long evening and as an almost blind- 
ing glare; which was quite right for the donnee, 
the gradual shrinkage of the Shining One, the 
money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the 
successive degrees of loose bagginess as he leads 
the reckless young man he has originally con- 
tracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, 
till at last he is a mere shrivelled silver string 
such as you could almost draw through a keyhole. 
That was the striking moral, for the young man, 
however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; 
which we hadn't in the least been, who had had all 
his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever 
this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these 
connections, at a much later time, on reflecting 
that had we only been ''taken" in the Paris of that 
period as we had been taken in New York we 
might have come in for celebrities — supremely 
fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of the his- 
trionic temperament, springing as they did from 
the soil of the richest romanticism and adding to 
its richness — who practised that braver art and 



356 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

finer finish which a comparatively homogenous 
pubHc, forming a compact critical body, still left 
possible. Rachel was alive, but dying; the mem- 
ory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still 
in the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a massive, a 
monstrous antique, had withal returned for a sea- 
son to the stage; but we missed her, as we missed 
Dejazet and Frederic Lemaitre and Melingue and 
Samson; to say nothing of others of the age be- 
fore the flood — taking for the flood that actual 
high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the gen- 
eral alien and polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which 
I remember to have heard Gustave Flaubert la- 
ment as the ruin of the theatre through the as- 
sumption of judgeship by a bench to whom the 
very values of the speech of author and actor were 
virtually closed, or at the best uncertain. 

I enjoyed but two snatches of the older repre- 
sentational art — no particular of either of which, 
however, has faded from me; the earlier and rarer 
of these an evening at the Gymnase for a spec- 
tacle coupe, with Mesdames Rose Cheri, Melanie, 
Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards Victoria-La- 
fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my 
aunt and my brother into the stuffy baignoire, 
and I take to my memory in especial Madame de 
Girardin's Une Femme qui Deteste son Mari; the 
thrilling story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady 
who, to save her loyalist husband, during the Rev- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 357 

olution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions, repre- 
sents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to 
keep him the more safely concealed in her house. 
He jflattens himself, to almost greater peril of life, 
behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a 
secret for opening when he requires air and food 
and they may for a fearful fleeting instant be 
alone together; and the point of the picture is in 
the contrast between these melting moments and 
the heroine's tenue under the tremendous strain 
of receiving on the one side the invading, investi- 
gating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious 
but successfully baffled, and on the other her noble 
relatives, her husband's mother and sister if I 
rightly remember, who are not in the secret and 
whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, 
though alone with her, and themselves in hourly 
danger, they might be trusted, and who, believing 
him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, 
treat her, in her republican rage, as lost to all 
honour and all duty. One's sense of such things 
after so long a time has of course scant authority 
for others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose 
Cheri's fine play just as I trust that of her phy- 
sique ingrat, her at first extremely odd and posi- 
tively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman 
with a high bulging forehead, somewhat of the 
form of Rachel's, for whom the triumphs of pro- 
duced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth 



358 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

great dramas of the younger Dumas, had to be 
triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence of 
this order connects itseK, and quite three years 
later, with the old dingy Vaudeville of the Place 
de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's com- 
pany a rhymed domestic drama of the then still 
admired Ponsard, Ce qui Plait aux Femmes; a 
piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success, but 
that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. 
How was it possible, I wondered, to have more 
grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than Made- 
moiselle Fargeuil, the heroine? — the fine lady 
whom a pair of rival lovers, seeking to win her 
hand by offering her what will most please her, 
treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fete, a little 
play within a play, at which we assist, and in the 
other to the inside view of an attic of misery, into 
which the more cunning suitor introduces her just 
in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, 
from being ruinously, that is successfully, tempted 
by a terrible old woman, a prowling revendeuse, 
who dangles before her the condition on which 
so pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her 
happier sister, the courted young widow, inter- 
venes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, 
opens for her an account with baker and butcher, 
and, doubting no longer which flame is to be 
crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases 
women most is the exercise of charity. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 359 

Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary 
veteran of the stage, Mademoiselle Pierson, 
almost immemorially attached, for later genera- 
tions, to the Theatre Frangais, the span of whose 
career thus strikes me as fabulous, though she 
figured as a very juvenile beauty in the sm.a\\f eerie 
or allegory forming M. Ponsard's second act. 
She has been playing mothers and aunts this many 
and many a year — and still indeed much as a 
juvenile beauty. Not that light circumstance, 
however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the 
further fact that I was to admire Mademoiselle 
Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had 
given all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her 
shining firmness, when she had passed from inter- 
esting comedy and even from romantic drama — 
not less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sar- 
dou's Patrie as a bridge — to the use of the bigger 
brush of the Ambigu and other homes of melo- 
drama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract 
from the pair of modest memories in question is 
rather their value as a glimpse of the old order 
that spoke so much less of our hundred modern 
material resources, matters the stage of to-day 
appears mainly to live by, and such volumes more 
of the one thing that was then, and that, given 
various other things, had to be, of the essence. 
That one thing was the quality, to say nothing 
of the quantity, of the actor's personal resource, 



360 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

technical history, tested temper, proved experi- 
ence; on which almost everything had to depend, 
and the thought of which makes the mere starved 
scene and medium of the period, the rest of the 
picture, a more confessed and more heroic battle- 
ground. They have been more and more eased 
off, the scene and medium, for our couple of 
generations, so much so in fact that the rest of the 
picture has become almost all the picture: the 
author and the producer, among us, lift the weight 
of the play from the performer — particularly of 
the play dealing with our immediate life and 
manners and aspects — after a fashion which does 
half the work, thus reducing the "personal equa- 
tion," the demand for the maximum of individual 
doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and 
sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events 
may even so short an impression serve; impres- 
sion of the strenuous age and its fine old master- 
ful assouplissement of its victims — who were not 
the expert spectators. The spectators were so 
expert, so broken in to material suffering for the 
sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was 
only material, they found the sesthetic reward, 
the critical relish of the essence, all adequate; a 
fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of large 
application. Everything but • the "interpreta- 
tion," the personal, in the French theatre of those 
days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and fu- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 361 

tility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit 
is wholly impatient — let alone other conditions 
still that were detestable even at the time, and 
some of which, forms of discomfort and annoy- 
ance, linger on to this day. The playhouse, in 
short, was almost a place of physical torture, and 
it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. 
Add to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe 
and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevil- 
listes; which part of the exhibition, till modern 
comedy began, under the younger Dumas and 
Augier, had for its counterpart but the terrible 
dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity 
and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of 
the romantic and melodramatic "output." It paid 
apparently, in the golden age of acting, to sit 
through interminable evenings in impossible places 
— since to assume that the age was in that par- 
ticular respect golden (for which we have in fact 
a good deal of evidence) alone explains the pa- 
tience of the public. With the public the actors 
were, according to their seasoned strength, almost 
exclusively appointed to deal, just as in the con- 
ditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this 
charge is laid on almost everyone concerned in the 
case save the representatives of the parts. And 
far more other people are now concerned than of 
old; not least those who have learned to make 
the playhouse endurable. All of which leaves us 



362 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

with this interesting vision of a possibly great 
truth, the truth that you can't have more than 
one kind of intensity — intensity worthy of the 
name — at once. The intensity of the golden age 
of the histrion was the intensity of his good faith. 
The intensity of our period is that of the "pro- 
ducer's" and machinist's, to which add even that 
of architect, author and critic. Between which 
derivative kind of that article, as we may call it, 
and the other, the immediate kind, it would ap- 
pear that you have absolutely to choose. 



XXVII 

I SEE much of the rest of that particular Paris 
time in the Hght of the Institution Fezandie, 
and I see the Institution Fezandie, Rue Bal- 
zac, in the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's 
lean asylum for the petits pays chauds, of which I 
have felt the previous institutions of New York 
sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain 
other of his studies in that field of the precarious, 
the ambiguous Paris over parts of which the great 
Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysees flings, at 
its hours, by its wide protective plausible shadow, 
a precious mantle of "tone." They gather, these 
chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence 
and enjoy at its expense a degree of reflected dig- 
nity. It was to the big square villa of the Rue 
Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted 
with vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. 
Lerambert, an establishment that strikes me, at 
this distance of time, as of the oddest and most 
indescribable — or as describable at best in some 
of the finer turns and touches of Daudet's best 
method. The picture indeed should not be invid- 
ious — it so little needs that, I feel, for its due 

363 



! TJ 



^ 



364 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

measure of the vivid, the queer, the droll, all com- 
ing back to me without prejudice to its air as of 
an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and 
loose and vague, as confused and embarrassed and 
helpless; I see it, I fear, as quite ridiculous, but 
as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at 
least, and as having left us with a fund of human 
impressions; it played before us such a variety 
of figure and character and so relieved us of a 
sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of 
abstract knowledge. It was a recreational, or at 
least a social, rather than a tuitional house; which 
fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with 
our parents, when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they 
asked themselves, with their considerable prac- 
tice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so 
many free spirits of that time in New York and 
Boston, had been much interested in the writings 
of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the "phal- 
anstery" as the solution of human troubles, and 
it comes to me that he must have met or in other 
words heard of M. Fezandie as an active and sym- 
pathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only 
ex-Fourierists by that time,) who was embarking, 
not far from us, on an experiment if not abso- 
lutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any 
rate enriched, by a bold idealisfn. I like to think 
of the Institution as all but phalansteric — it so 
corrects any fear that such places might be dreary. 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 365 

I recall this one as positively gay — bristling and 
bustling and resonant, untouched by the stren- 
uous note, for instance, of Hawthorne's co-opera- 
tive Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then 
still almost suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous 
quarter, now oppressively uniform, it was close to 
where Balzac had ended his life, though I ques- 
tion its identity — as for a while I tried not to — 
with the scene itself of the great man's catastrophe. 
Round its high-walled garden at all events he 
would have come and gone — a throb of inference 
that had for some years indeed to be postponed 
for me; though an association displacing to-day, 
over the whole spot, every other interest. I in 
any case can't pretend not to have been most ap- 
pealed to by that especial phase of our education 
from which the pedagogic process as commonly 
understood was most fantastically absent. It ex- 
celled in this respect, the Fezandie phase, even 
others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows, for 
the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was 
no poor blank, but that it fairly creaked and 
groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its wealth. 
We were externes, the three of us, but we remained 
in general to luncheon; coming home then, late 
in the afternoon, with an almost sore experience 
of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the 
beauty of it all was that the Institution was, speak- 
ing technically, not more a pensionnat, with pre- 



11 



p, 



366 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

vailingly English and American pupils, than a 
pension, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, 
and that our two categories were shaken up to- 
gether to the liveliest effect. This had been M. 
Fezandie's grand conception; a son of the south, 
bald and slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a 
quick but anxious, rather melancholy eye and a 
slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied her- 
self, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, 
where or how to turn; I see him as a Daudet 
meridional, but of the sensitive, not the sensual, 
type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather 
down hill — he had enjoyed some arrested, pos- 
sibly blighted, connection in America — and as 
ready always again for some new application of 
faith and funds. If fondly failing in the least to 
see why the particular application in the Rue 
Balzac — the body of pensioners ranging from 
infancy to hoary eld — shouldn't have been a 
bright success could have made it one, it would 
have been a most original triumph. 

I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed 
adventure, a brave little seeing of the world on 
the happy pretext of "lessons." We had lessons 
from time to time, but had them in company with 
ladies and gentlemen, young men and young 
women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat at 
long boards of green cloth with us and with sev- 
eral of our contemporaries, English and American 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 367 

boys, taking dictees from the head of the house 
himself or from the aged and most remarkable 
M. Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a 
superannuated actor (he above all such a model 
for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed 
readings aloud to him of the French classics older 
and newer by wondrous reminiscences and even 
imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a 
cloud of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the 
impassioned, though I think alas underfed, M. 
Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," 
beyond the first Empire, to the scenes of the Rev- 
olution — this perhaps partly by reason, in the 
first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when 
we met it, of the sovereign word liherte^ the pov- 
erty of which, our deplorable "libbete," without 
r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding the 
right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with 
thirty r's, the prolonged beat of a drum. And 
then we beheved him, if artistically conservative, 
politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, 
though knowing that those so marked had to 
walk, and even to breathe, cautiously for fear of 
the mouchards of the tyrant; we knew all about 
mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of 
aviators or suffragettes — to remember which in 
an age so candidly unconscious of them is to feel 
how much history we have seen unrolled. There 
were times when he but paced up and down and 



368 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

round the long table — I see him as never seated, 
but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew 
of the classe; but in particular I hear him recite 
to us the combat with the Moors from Le Cid 
and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to 
crouch down on his haunches in order to spring 
up again terrifically to the height of "Nous nous 
levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as 
if on the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped 
to their feet. But he threw off these broken lights 
with a quick relapse to indifference; he didn't 
like the Anglo-Saxon — of the children of Albion 
at least his view was low; on his American speci- 
mens he had, I observed, more mercy; and this 
imperfection of sympathy (the question of Water- 
loo apart) rested, it was impossible not to feel, on 
his so resenting the dishonour suffered at our hands 
by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great 
field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. 
I think he fairly loathed our closed English vowels 
and confused consonants, our destitution of sounds 
that he recognised as sounds; though why in this 
connection he put up best with our own compa- 
triots, embroiled at that time often in even 
stranger vocables than now, is more than I can 
say. I think that would be explained perhaps by 
his feeling in them as an old equalitarian certain 
accessibilities quand meme. Besides, we of the 
younger persuasion at least must have done his 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 369 

ear less violence than those earnest ladies from 
beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen 
qualifying for examinations and careers who 
flocked with us both to the plausibly spread 
and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose 
part I seem to see it again an effort of anguish 
to "pick up" the happy idiom that we had uncon- 
sciously acquired. French, in the fine old form- 
ula of those days, so much diffused, "was the 
language of the family"; but I think it must have 
appeared to these students in general a family 
of which the youngest members were but scantly 
kept in their place. We piped with a greater 
facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which 
sounds as if we might have become, in these 
strange collocations, fairly offensive little prigs. 
That was none the less not the case, for there 
were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, 
to whom on the lingual or the "family" ground, 
we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in comparison 
with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, 
I remember an occasion of my having to sink to 
insignificance. There was at the Institution lit- 
tle of a staff — besides waiters and bonnes; but 
it embraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well 
as M. Bonnefons — M. Mesnard of the new gen- 
eration, instructor in whatever it might be, among 
the arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, 
and with them, to help us out, more or less our 



I. 



S70 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

eyes. It is significant that this elegant branch 
is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mes- 
nard, in fine, as no less modern and cheap than 
M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. He 
had nevertheless given me his attention, one 
morning, doubtless patiently enough, in some cor- 
ner of the villa that we had for the moment prac- 
tically to ourselves — I seem to see a small empty 
room looking on the garden; when there entered 
to us, benevolently ushered by Madame Fezan- 
die, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, 
as it struck me, a pupil newly arrived. I remem- 
ber of him mainly that he had a sort of nimbus 
of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that 
deeply hoarse voice with which French children 
used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnard asked 
of him at once, with interest, his name, and on 
his pronouncing it sought to know, with livelier 
attention, if he were then the son of M. Arsene 
Houssaye, lately director of the Theatre Frangais. 
To this distinction the boy confessed — all to 
such intensification of our repetiteur's interest 
that I knew myself quite dropped, in comparison, 
from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our 
little visitor's affected him visibly as dazzling, 
and I felt justified after a while, in stealing away 
into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to 
live to be the late M. Henry Houssaye, the shining 
hellenist and historian. I have never forgotten 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 371 

the ecstasy of hope in M. Mesnard's question — 
as a hght on the reverence then entertained for 
the institution M. Houssaye the elder had admin- 
istered. 



XXVIII 

THERE comes to me, in spite of these memo- 
ries of an extended connection, a sense as 
of some shrinkage or decHne in the beaux 
jours of the Institution; which seems to have found 
its current run a bit thick and troubled, rather 
than with the pleasant plash in which we at first 
appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try- 
to reconstitute, that the general enterprise simply 
proved a fantasy not workable, and that at any 
rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended 
to outnumber the candid jeunesse; so that I wonder 
by the same token on what theory of the Castalian 
spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M. 
Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it 
were, may have been moved to dip him into our 
well. Shall I blush to relate that my own im- 
pression of its virtue must have come exactly 
from this uncanny turn taken — and quite in 
spite of the high Fezandie ideals — by the invrai- 
semblable house of entertainment where the assimi- 
lation of no form of innocence was doubted of by 
reason of the forms of experience that insisted 
somehow on cropping up, and no form of experi- 
ence too directly deprecated by reason of the orig- 

372 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 373 

inally plotted tender growths of innocence. And 
some of these shapes were precisely those from 
which our good principal may well have first drawn 
his liveliest reassurance: I seem to remember such 
ancient American virgins in especial and such odd 
and either distinctively long-necked or more par- 
ticularly long-haired and chinless compatriots, in 
black frock-coats of no type or "cut," no sug- 
gested application at all as garments — applica- 
tion, that is, to anything in the nature of char- 
acter or circumstance, function or position — 
gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons 
almost terrorised by his refusal to recognise, 
among the barbarous races, any approach to his 
view of the great principle of Diction. I remember 
deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades 
of scorn and seeing how, given his own background, 
they were thoroughly founded; I remember above 
all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the 
creature wholly animated and containing no waste 
expressional spaces, no imaginative flatnesses, the 
notion of the luxury of life, though indeed of the 
amount of trouble of it too, when none of the let- 
ters of the alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, 
involved in being a Frenchman. The liveliest les- 
son I must have drawn, however, from that source 
makes in any case, at the best, an odd educational 
connection, given the kind of concentration at 
which education, even such as ours, is supposed 



374 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

especially to aim: I speak of that direct promis- 
cuity of insights which might easily have been 
pronounced profitless, with their attendant impres- 
sions and quickened sensibilities — yielding, as 
these last did, harvests of apparitions. I posi- 
tively cherish at the present hour the fond fancy 
that we all soaked in some such sublime element 
as might still have hung about there — I mean on 
the very spot — from the vital presence, so lately 
extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had in- 
volved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud 
of other presences, so arrayed an army of inter- 
related shades, that the air was still thick as with 
the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and 
supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative 
traffic. The Pension Vauquer, then but lately ex- 
istent, according to Le Pere Goriot, on the other 
side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; 
but the figures peopling it are not to-day essen- 
tially more intense (that is as a matter of the 
marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, 
as compared with the paleness of the conned page 
in general,) than I persuade myself, with so little 
difficulty, that I found the more numerous and 
more shifting, though properly doubtless less in- 
spiring, constituents of the Pension Fezandie. 
Fantastic and all "subjective "-that I should at- 
tribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene 
spreading round them, to any competent percep- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 375 

tion, in the small-boy mind, that the general or 
public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp 
intensity, of its own; ruffling all things, as they 
came, with the morning breath of the Second Em- 
pire and making them twinkle back with a light of 
resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the 
force of a great grimacing example. The grimace 
might have been legibly there in the air, to the 
young apprehension, and could I but simplify this 
record enough I should represent everything as 
part of it. I seemed at any rate meanwhile to 
think of the Fezandie young men, young English- 
men mostly, who were getting up their French, in 
that many-coloured air, for what I supposed, in 
my candour, to be appointments and ''posts," dip- 
lomatic, commercial, vaguely official, and who, as 
I now infer, though I didn't altogether embrace it 
at the time, must, under the loose rule of the estab- 
lishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. 
It was as a side-wind of their free criticism, I take 
it, that I felt the first chill of an apprehended de- 
cline of the estabHshment, some pang of prevision 
of what might come, and come as with a crash, of 
the general fine fallacy on which it rested. Their 
criticism was for that matter free enough, causing 
me to admire it even while it terrified. They ex- 
pressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn — 
such as might naturally proceed, I think I felt, 
from a mightier race; they spoke of poor old Bonne- 



376 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

fons, they spoke of our good Fezandie himself, they 
spoke more or less of everyone within view, as beg- 
gars and beasts, and I remember to have heard on 
their lips no qualification of any dish served to us at 
dejeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which 
my brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. 
These were expressions, absent from our domestic, 
our American air either of fonder discriminations or 
vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the 
range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; 
and as the general tone of them to-day comes back 
to me it floods somehow with light the image of the 
fine old insular confidence (so intellectually unregen- 
erate then that such a name scarce covers it, though 
inward stirrings and the growth of a comparative 
sense of things have now begun unnaturally to 
agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general out- 
ward concussion of the English "abroad" with the 
fact of being abroad took place. The Fezandie 
young men were as much abroad as might be, and 
yet figured to me — largely by the upsetting force 
of that confidence, all but physically exercised — 
as the finest, handsomest, knowingest creatures; 
so that when I met them of an afternoon descend- 
ing the Champs-Elysees with fine long strides and 
in the costume of the period, for which we can 
always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," 
the fact that I was for the most part walking se- 
dately either with my mother or my aunt, or even 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 377 

with my sister and her governess, caused the spark 
of my vision that they were armed for conquest, 
or at the least for adventure, more expansively to 
glow. I am not sure whether as a general thing 
they honoured me at such instants with a sign of 
recognition; but I recover in especial the sense of 
an evening hour during which I had accompanied 
my mother to the Hotel Meurice, where one of 
the New York cousins aforementioned, daughter of 
one of the Albany uncles — that is of the Rhine- 
beck member of the group — had perched for a 
time, so incongruously, one already seemed to feel, 
after the sorriest stroke of fate. I see again the 
gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or 
the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year 
of the Rue d'Angouleme had been followed by a 
migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or 
rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer inter- 
woven, and we might have made our beguiled way 
from either domicile); and the whole impression 
seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glit- 
tering vitrines about the poor Pendletons* bereave- 
ment, their loss of their only, their so sturdily 
handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state 
with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous 
cookery with which I find my recall of Paris from 
those years so disproportionately and so quite 
other than stomachically charged. The point of 
all of which is simply that just as we had issued 



378 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

from the hotel, my mother anxiously urging me 
through the cross currents and queer contacts, as 
it were, of the great bazaar (of which the Rue de 
Rivoli was then a much more bristling avenue than 
now) rather than depending on me for support and 
protection, there swung into view the most splen- 
did, as I at least esteemed him, of my elders and 
betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left the ques- 
tions there supposedly engaging us far behind, 
and, with his high hat a trifle askew and his cigar 
actively alight, revealed to me at a glance what 
it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was 
speed in his step, assurance in his air, he was vis- 
ibly, impatiently on the way; and he gave me 
thereby my first full image of what it was exactly 
to be on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, 
through the fact that, with a flourish of the afore- 
said high hat (from which the Englishman of that 
age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to the 
act of recognition, and to deference to my com- 
panion, but with a grand big-boy good-humour that 

— as I remember from childhood the so frequent 
effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top- 
most overlooking, on the part of an admired senior 

— only gave an accent to the difference. As if he 
cared, or could have, that I but went forth through 
the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while 
he had greeted us with a grace £hat was as a beat 
of the very wings of freedom! Of such shreds, at 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 379 

any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young 
sensibility — when memory (if sensibility has at 
all existed for it) rummages over our old trunkf ul of 
spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever so tenderly 
this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the 
pattern to the light. I find myself in this connec- 
tion so restlessly and tenderly rummage that the 
tatters, however thin, come out in handsful and 
every shred seems tangled with another. 

Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, 
becomes, and very preferably, the frame of another 
and a better picture, drawing to it cognate asso- 
ciations, those of that element of the New York 
cousinship which had originally operated to place 
there in a shining and even, as it were, an economic 
light a "preference for Paris" — which preference, 
during the period of the Rue d'Angouleme and the 
Rue Montaigne, we wistfully saw at play, the very 
lightest and freest, on the part of the inimitable 
Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville 
were over; a period of relative rigour at the Flor- 
ence of the still encircling walls, the still so existent 
abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to gather, a 
thing of the past; great accessions, consciously 
awaited during the previous leaner time, had beau- 
tifully befallen them, and my own whole conscious- 
ness of the general air — so insistently I discrimi- 
nate for that alone — was coloured by a familiar 
view of their enjoyment of these on a tremendously 



I 



380 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

draped and festooned premier of the Rue-St.- 
Honore, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statu- 
ettes and looking almost straight across to the 
British Embassy; rather a low premier, after the 
manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where 
the closed windows, which but scantly distin- 
guished between our own sounds and those of the 
sociable, and yet the terrible, street of records and 
memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light 
thick with a mixture of every sort of queer old 
Parisian amenity and reference : as if to look or to 
listen or to touch were somehow at the same time 
to probe, to recover and communicate, to behold, 
to taste and even to smell — to one's greater as- 
sault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the ejffect 
of some sweet and strange repletion, as from the 
continued consumption, say, out of flounced and 
puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate and 
other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing 
as something for one's developed senses to live up 
to and make light of, and have been rather ashamed 
of my own for just a little sickishly staggering un- 
der it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall 
of our cousins' inbred ease, from far back, in all 
such assumable relations; and of how, four of the 
simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were 
(with the eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the 
general ground, after marriage and widowhood, 
and still to be blooming there) , they were possessed 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 381 

of the scene and its great reaches and resources 
and possibihties in a degree that reduced us to 
small provincialism and a hanging on their lips 
when they told us, that is when the gentlest of 
mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" 
did, of presentations at the Tuileries to the then 
all- wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports 
touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, 
yet after all so scantily indurated relatives, by the 
question of whether occasions so great didn't per- 
haps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which 
they were usually appointed. There was some- 
thing of an implication in the air of those days, 
when young Americans were more numerously 
lovely than now, or at least more wide-eyed, it 
would fairly appear, that some account of the only 
tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe 
(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken 
even at the Tuileries. 

But what most comes back to me as the very note 
and fragrance of the New York cousinship in this 
general connection is a time that I remember to 
have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when 
the particular cousins I now speak of had con- 
ceived, under the influence of I know not what 
unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste 
for the earliest possible rambles and researches, in 
which they were so good as to allow me, when I 
was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving 



382 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

walks, of an extraordinarily matinal character, at 
the hour of the meticulous rag-pickers and excep- 
tionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns 
of the Second Empire as at no time since; which 
made us all feel together, under the conduct of 
Honorine, bright child of the pavement herseK, as 
if we, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had 
also something to say to the great show presently 
to be opened, and were free, throughout the place, 
as those are free of a house who know its aspects 
of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I 
call our shepherdess Honorine even though per- 
haps not infallibly naming the sociable soubrette 
who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have 
been an official inspectress in person, and to whose 
] easy care or, more particularly, expert sensibility 

\ and candour of sympathy and curiosity, our flock 

was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she 
was Clementine or Augustine — which is a trifle; 
since what I thus recover, in any case, of these 
brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those 
communities of contemplation that made us most 
hang about the jewellers' windows in the Palais 
Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on 
the Boulevard. The Palais Royal, now so dis- 
honoured and disavowed, was then the very Paris 
H of Paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken 

down, at that hour, for our especial benefit, and I 
remember well how, the "dressing" of so large a 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 383 

number of the compact and richly condensed fronts 
being more often than not a matter of diamonds 
and pearls, rubies and sapphires, that represented, 
in their ingenuities of combination and contortion, 
the highest taste of the time, I found open to me 
any amount of superior study of the fact that the 
spell of gems seemed for the feminine nature al- 
most alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes 
back to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even 
thought it became a young man of the world to 
express as to this or that object a refined and in- 
telligent preference; but what I really most had 
before me was the chorus of abjection, as I might 
well have called it, led, at the highest pitch, by 
Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the 
crudity, so to say, of its wistfulness, a natural 
frankness of passion — goodness knew in fact (for 
my small intelligence really didn't) what depths 
of corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them 
again, these queer dim plays of consciousness: my 
sense that my innocent companions, Honorine en 
tete, would have done anything or everything for 
the richest ruby, and that though one couldn't 
one's self be decently dead to that richness one 
didn't at all know what "anything" might be or 
in the least what "everything" was. The gush- 
ing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew still 
less of that, and Honorine's brave gloss of a whole 
range alike of possibilities and actualities was in 
itself a true social grace. 



384 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but 
wastefuUy mused — which was after all my form 
of enjoyment; I was shy for it, though it was a 
truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that I didn't 
really at all care for gems, that rubies and pearls, 
in no matter what collocations, left me compara- 
tively cold; that I actually cared for them about as 
little as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for 
flowers. Later on I was to become aware that I 
*' adored" trees and architectural marbles — that 
for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently 
bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular I 
would have given a bag of rubies ; but by then the 
time had passed for my being troubled to make out 
what in that case would represent on a small boy's 
part the corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, 
before the vitrines, by the cousins. That hadn't, 
as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had 
so much at the time that if it had been frankly 
put to me I must have quite confessed my ina- 
bility to say — and must, I gather, by the same 
stroke, have been ashamed of such inward pen- 
ury; feeling that as a boy I showed more poorly 
than girls. There was a difference meanwhile 
for such puzzlements before the porticos of the 
theatres; all questions melted for me there into 
the single depth of envy — enyy of the equal, 
the beatific command of the evening hour, in 
the regime of Honorine's young train, who were 
fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier even 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 385 

after shedding buckets of tears the night before, 
and not so much as for the first or the second time, 
over the beautiful story of La Dame aux CameHas. 
There indeed was another humihation, but by my 
weakness of position much more than of nature: 
whatever doing of "everything" might have been 
revealed to me as a means to the end, I would 
certainly have done it for a sight of Madame Doche 
and Fechter in Dumas's triumphant idyll — now 
enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous classi- 
cism; with which, as with the merits of its inter- 
preters, Honorine's happy charges had become 
perfectly and if not quite serenely, at least ever 
so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a won- 
drous mixed sweetness and sharpness and queer- 
ness of uneffaced reminiscence is all that aspect of 
the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping 
nights melting along the odorously bedamped and 
retouched streets and arcades; bright in the in- 
effable morning light, above all, of our peculiar 
young culture and candour! 

All of which again has too easily led me to drop 
for a moment my more leading clue of that radia- 
tion of goodnature from Gertrude Pendleton and 
her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps 
most complacently basked. The becraped pas- 
sage at Meurice's alluded to a little back was of a 
later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had 
been, that first winter, mainly from a petit hotel 



386 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

somewhere ''on the other side," as we used with a 
large sketchiness to say, of the Champs Elysees; a 
region at that time reduced to no regularity, but 
figuring to my fond fancy as a chaos of accidents 
and contrasts where petits hotels of archaic type 
were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and 
pavilions ever so characteristic, yet ever so inde- 
finable, snuggled between frank industries and vul- 
garities — all brightened these indeed by the so- 
ciable note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering 
or of other bavardise. The great consistencies of 
arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony, were 
still to come, so that it seemed rather original to 
live there; in spite of which the attraction of the 
hazard of it on the part of our then so uniformly 
natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeni- 
ously, or even expressively, as just gesticulatively 
and helplessly gay — since that earlier pitch of 
New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that 
matter pretended to, enunciation — was quite in 
what I at least took to be the glitter of her very 
conventions and traditions themselves; exemplified 
for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party 
in honour of the small son of all hopes whom she 
was so precipitately to lose : an occasion which, as 
we had, in our way, known the act of baptism but 
as so abbreviated and in fact sO tacit a business, 
had the effect for us of one of the great "forms" 
of a society taking itself with typical seriousness. 



4B#li!j 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 387 

We were much more serious than the Pendletons, 
but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness 
in our state of our being able to make no such at- 
testation of it. The evening can have been but 
of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, 
with small guests, in congruity with its small hero, 
as well as large; but I must have found myself 
more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of 
those round which as many kinds of circumstance 
as possible clustered — so that the more of these 
there were the more one might imagine a great social 
order observed. How shall I now pretend to say 
how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recog- 
nised? — with the remarkable one, to begin with, 
and which led fancy so far afield, that the " religious 
ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of 
twinkling lustres and disposed flowers and ladies 
with bare shoulders (that platitudinous bareness of 
the period that suggested somehow the moral line, 
drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil) ; with little 
English girls, daughters of a famous physician of 
that nationality then pursuing a Parisian career (he 
must have helped the little victim into the world), 
and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; 
with round glazed and beribboned boxes of multi- 
coloured sugared almonds, dragees de bapteme 
above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as 
we might have gathered apples from a shaken tree, 
and which symbolised as nothing else the ritual 



388 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really 
came back but to the dragees de bapt^me, not 
strictly more immemorial to our young appreci- 
ation than the New Year's cake and the "Election" 
cake known to us in New York, yet immensely 
more official and of the nature of scattered lar- 
gesse; partly through the days and days, as it 
seemed to me, that our life was to be furnished, re- 
inforced and almost encumbered with them. It 
wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that 
they were somehow so important and so historic. 
It was with no such frippery, however, that I 
connected the occasional presence among us of the 
young member of the cousinship (in this case of 
the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness 
of wonder, though not at all, with his then marked 
difference of age, by inviting my free approach. 
Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of 
this record alluded, at that time doing his bacca- 
laureat on the other side of the Seine and coming 
over to our world at scraps of moments (for I recall 
my awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, 
of his toil), as to quite a make-believe and ginger- 
bread place, the lightest of substitutes for the 
"Europe" in which he had been from the first so 
technically plunged. His mother and sister, also on 
an earlier page referred to, had, from their distance, 
committed him to the great city to be "finished," 
educationally, to the point that for our strenuous 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 389 

cousin Charlotte was the only proper one — and I 
feel sure he can have acquitted himself in this par- 
ticular in a manner that would have passed for 
brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff 
little standards, always tend to burn low in her 
presence. These ladies were to develop more and 
more the practice of living in odd places for abstract 
inhuman reasons — at Marseilles, at Diisseldorf 
(if I rightly recall their principal German sojourn), 
at Naples, above all, for a long stage; where, in 
particular, their grounds of residence were somehow 
not as those of others, even though I recollect, from 
a much later time, attending them there at the 
opera, an experience which, in their fashion, they 
succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of 
the concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. 
Later impressions, few but firm, were so to enhance 
one's tenderness for Vernon's own image, the most 
interesting surely in all the troop of our young 
kinsmen early baffled and gathered, that he glances 
at me out of the Paris period, fresh-coloured, just 
blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his 
breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and 
shyness, with such an appeal to the right idealisa- 
tion, or to belated justice, as makes of mere evoca- 
tion a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite 
richly laid upon me at the time — I get it all back 
— that he, two or three years older than my elder 
brother and dipped more early, as well as held more 






390 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of 
which we all together, though with our differences 
of consistency, recognised, was the positive and 
living proof of what the process, comparatively 
poor for ourselves, could do at its best and with 
clay originally and domestically kneaded to the 
right plasticity; besides which he shone, to my 
fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly 
and quietly in his very grain, with the vague, 
the supposititious, but the intensely accent-giving 
stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly 
imagined and so superficially brushed on our pious 
walks to the Luxembourg and through the parts 
where the glamour might have hung thickest. We 
were to see him a little — but two or three times — 
three or four years later, when, just before our own 
return, he had come back to America for the pur- 
pose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard 
Law School; and to see him still always with the 
smile that was essentially as facial, as livingly and 
loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion it- 
self; always too with the air of caring so little for 
what he had been put through that, under any ap- 
peal to give out, more or less wonderfully, some 
sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still 
mostly panted as from a laughing mental embar- 
rassment: he had been put through too much; it 
was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known 
where to begin. He did give out, a little, on occa- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 391 

sion — speaking, that is, on my different plane, 
as it were, and by the roundabout report of my 
brother; he gave out, it appeared, as they walked 
together across shining Newport sands, some frag- 
ment, some beginning of a very youthful poem 
that "Europe" had, with other results, moved him 
to, and a faint thin shred of which was to stick in 
my remembrance for reasons independent of its 
quality: 

"Harold, rememberest thou the day. 
We rode along the Appian Way? 

Neglected tomb and altar cast 

Their lengthening shadow o'er the plain. 

And while we talked the mighty past 
Around us lived and breathed again ! " 

That was European enough, and yet he had re- 
turned to America really to find himself, even with 
every effort made immediately near him to defeat 
the discovery. He found himself, with the out- 
break of the War, simply as the American soldier, 
and not under any bribe, however dim, of the ep- 
aulette or the girt sword; but just as the common 
enlisting native, which he smiled and gasped — to 
the increase of his happy shortness of breath, as 
from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no 
lack of personal soundness — at feeling himself so 
like to be. As strange, yet as still more touching 
than strange, I recall the sight, even at a distance, 



392 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

of the drop straight off him of all his layers of 
educational varnish, the possession of the "ad- 
vantages," the tongues, the degrees, the diplomas, 
the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all 
sunk in — a sacrifice of precious attributes that 
might almost have been viewed as a wild bonfire. 
So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps 
sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, 
didn't fail to view it — judging it also, sharply hos- 
tile to the action of the North as the whole dreadful 
situation found her, with deep and resentful dis- 
pleasure. I remember how I thought of Vernon 
himself, during the business, as at once so despoiled, 
so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as 
vaguely to suggest something more in him still, 
some deep-down reaction, some extremity of indif- 
ference and defiance, some exhibition of a young 
character too long pressed and impressed, too long 
prescribed to and with too much expected of it, and 
all under too firmer a will; so that the public pre- 
text had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which 
without its greatness might have failed him. As 
the case was to turn nothing — that is nothing he 
most wanted and, remarkably, most enjoyed — 
did fail him at all. I forget with which of the 
possible States, New York, Massachusetts or 
Rhode Island (though I think the first) he had 
taken service; only seeming to remember that this 
all went on for him at the start in McClellan's and 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 393 

later on in Grant's army, and that, badly wounded 
in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed 
by his mother, recently restored to America for a 
brief stay. She held, I believe, in the event, that 
he had, under her care, given her his vow that, his 
term being up, he would not, should he get suflS- 
ciently well, re-engage. The question here was be- 
tween them, but it was definite that, materially 
speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. 
The old, the irrepressible adage, however, was to 
live again between them: when the devil was sick 
the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well 
the devil a saint was he! 

The devil a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who 
denied that he had passed his word, and who, as 
soon as he had surmounted his first disablement, 
passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At 
once restored to the front and to what now gave 
life for him its indispensable relish, he was in 
the thick, again, of the great carnage roundabout 
Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as I 
figure still incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. His 
mother had by this time indignantly returned to 
Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her 
younger son — the former of whom accepted, for 
our great pity, a little later on, the ofiice of closing 
the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not 
less firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, 
came back, on her brother's death, and, quietest. 



394 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

most colourless Electra of a lucidest Orestes, mak- 
ing her difficult way amid massed armies and bat- 
tle-drenched fields, got possession of his buried 
body and bore it for reinterment to Newport, the 
old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their fath- 
er's people, bothVernons and Kings. It must have 
been to see my mother, as well as to sail again for 
Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston, where 
I remember going down with her, at the last, to the 
dock of the English steamer, some black and tub- 
like Cunarder, an archaic "Africa" or "Asia" 
sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I 
saw her off drearily and helplessly enough, I well 
remember, and even at that moment found for her 
another image : what was she most like, though in a 
still sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, 
some employed little Bronte heroine? — though 
more indeed a Lucy Snowe than a Jane Eyre, and 
with no shade of a Bronte hero within sight. To 
this all the fine privilege and fine culture of all the 
fine countries (collective matter, from far back, of 
our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it 
had amounted for Vernon to the bare headstone on 
the Newport hillside where, by his mother's de- 
cree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint 
of the manner of his death. So grand, so finely 
personal a manner it appeared to me at the time, 
and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief 
record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 395 

as I have equally noted, was however, with her 
views, to find no grace in it so long as she lived; 
and his sister went back to her, and to Marseille, 
as they always called it, but prematurely to die. 



XXIX 

I FEEL that much might be made of my mem- 
ories of Boulogne-sur-Mer had I but here left 
room for the vast Httle subject; in which I 
should probably, once started, wander to and fro 
as exploringly, as perceivingly, as discoveringly, I 
am fairly tempted to call it, as might really give 
the measure of my small operations at the time. I 
was almost wholly reduced there to operations of 
that mere inward and superficially idle order at 
which we have already so freely assisted; reduced 
by a cause I shall presently mention, the produc- 
tion of a great blur, well-nigh after the fashion of 
some mild domestic but quite considerably spread- 
ing grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, 
such as it was, more or less immediately about me. 
I must personally have lived during this pale pre- 
dicament almost only by seeing what I could, after 
my incorrigible ambulant fashion — a practice that 
may well have made me pass for bringing home 
nothing in the least exhibitional — rather than by 
pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, 
to whatever intensity, our on the whole widening 
little circle. The images I speak of as matter for 
more evocation that I can spare them were the fruit 

396 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 397 

of two different periods at Boulogne, a shorter and 
a longer; this second appearing to us all, at the 
time, I gather, too endlessly and bUghtingly pro- 
longed: so sharply, before it was over, did I at any 
rate come to yearn for the Rue Montaigne again, 
the Rue Montaigne "sublet" for a term under a 
flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a "finan- 
cial crisis" of great violence to which the American 
world, as a matter now of recorded history, I be- 
lieve, had tragically fallen victim, and which had 
imperilled or curtailed for some months our moder- 
ate means of existence. We were to recover, I make 
out, our disturbed balance, and were to pursue 
awhile further our chase of the aHen, the somehow 
repeatedly postponed real opportunity; and the 
second, the comparatively cramped and depressed 
connection with the classic refuge, as it then was, 
of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, 
for the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense 
of this matter, was to be shuffled off at last with 
no scant relief and reaction. This is perhaps ex- 
actly why the whole picture of our existence at the 
Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now for 
the full indulgence, what would be in other words 
every touch of tenderness workable, after all the 
years, over the lost and confused and above all, on 
their own side, poor ultimately rather vulgarised 
and violated little sources of impression : items and 
aspects these which while they in their degree and 



- mm ii|g^> ■ »! a m ia>»<fc— w> ^ i tm. tmmtmamkkt^mm 



yl. 



/ 



398 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, 
or at least to appreciate, for their rewarding ex- 
treme queerness. The very centre of my particular 
consciousness of the place turned too soon to the 
fact of my coming in there for the gravest illness 
of my hfe, an all but mortal attack of the malignant 
typhus of old days; which, after laying me as low 
as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned 
me to a convalescence so arduous that I saw my 
apparently scant possibilities, by the measure of 
them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or 
through the expansive blur for which I found just 
above a homely image. 

This experience was to become when I had 
emerged from it the great reminiscence or circum- 
stance of old Boulogne for me, and I was to regard 
it, with much intelligence, I should have main- 
tained, as the marked limit of my state of being a 
small boy. I took on, when I had decently, and 
all the more because I had so retardedly, recovered, 
the sense of being a boy of other dimensions some- 
how altogether, and even with a new dimension in- 
troduced and acquired; a dimension that I was 
eventually to think of as a stretch in the direction 
of essential change or of Hving straight into a part 
of myself previously quite unvisited and now made 
accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. 
The blur of consciousness imaged by my grease- 
spot was not, I hasten to declare, without its re- 



mmmmmamait 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 399 

lenting edges and even, during its major insistence, 
fainter thicknesses; short of which, I see, my pic- 
ture, the picture I was always so incurably "after," 
would have failed of animation altogether — quite 
have failed to bristle with characteristics, with fig- 
ures and objects and scenic facts, particular pas- 
sages and moments, the stuff, in short, of that scrap 
of minor gain which I have spoken of as our mul- 
tipHed memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and 
much more later on, to feel how we had been, 
through the thick and thin of the whole adventure, 
assaulted as never before in so concentrated a way 
by local and social character? Such was the fashion 
after which the Boulogne of long ago — I have 
known next to nothing of it since — could come 
forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to 
meet the imagination open to such advances. It 
was, taking one thing with another, so verily 
drenched in character that I see myseK catching 
this fine flagrancy almost equally in everything; 
unless indeed I may have felt it rather smothered 
than presented on the comparatively sordid scene 
of the College Communal, not long afterwards to 
expand, I beheve, into the local Lycee, to which the 
inimitable process of our education promptly in- 
troduced us. I was to have less of the College than 
my elder and my younger brother, thanks to the 
interrupting illness that placed me so long, with its 
trail of after-effects, half complacently, half rue- 



! 



400 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

fully apart; but I suffered for a few early weeks the 
mainly malodorous sense of the braver life, pro- 
duced as this was by a deeply democratic institu- 
tion from which no small son even of the most soap- 
less home could possibly know exclusion. Odd, I 
recognise, that I should inhale the air of the place 
so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect; 
since character was there too, for whom it should 
concern, and my view of some of the material con- 
ditions, of the general collegiate presence toward 
the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right 
and not much short, as it comes back to me, of the 
then closely clustered and inviolate haute ville, the 
more or less surviving old town, the idle grey ram- 
part, the moated and towered citadel, the tree- 
shaded bastion for strolling and sitting "immor- 
tahsed " by Thackeray, achieved the monumental, 
in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated 
for us with the pursuit of learning. Didn't the 
Campaigner, suffering indigence at the misapplied 
hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed 
victim supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts 
— by which I mean in the haute ville — over some 
question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked 
joint that somebody had been "at".'^ Beside such 
builded approaches to an education as we had else- 
where known the College exhibited, with whatever 
reserves, the measure of style which almost any 
French accident of the administratively archi- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 401 

tectural order more easily rises to than fails of; 
even if the matter be but a question of the shyest 
similitude of a cour d'honneur, the court discon- 
necting the scene, by intention at least, from the 
basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole 
effect of opposed and windowed wall and impor- 
tant, or balanced and "placed," perron. These are 
many words for the dull precinct, as then presented, 
I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a 
special association, too ghostly now quite to catch 
again — the sense of certain Sundays, distinct from 
the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the 
week, when I seem to myself to have successfully 
flouted the whole constituted field by passing across 
it and from it to some quite ideally old-world little 
annexed musee de province, as inviolate in its way 
as the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like 
them in unreheved tone, where I repeatedly, and 
without another presence to hinder, looked about 
me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of 
stale academic art. Not one of these treasures, in 
its habit as it lived, do I recall; yet the sense and 
the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, 
not so elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight 
from them intimations of the interesting, that is 
revelations of the aesthetic, the historic, the criti- 
cal mystery and charm of things (of such things 
taken altogether), that added to my small loose 
handful of the seed of culture. 



402 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

That apprehension was, in its way, of our house 
of learning too, and yet I recall how, on the scant 
and simple terms I have glanced at, I quite revelled 
in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal 
shrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but 
to three or four recovered marks of the social com- 
position of the school. There were the sons of all 
the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remem- 
brance, of certain of the mechanics and artisans; 
but there was also the English contingent, these 
predominantly internes and uniformed, blue-jack- 
eted and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of 
odd redundancy, who by my conceit gave our 
association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summer 
morning on which, in the wide court — as wide, 
that is, as I Hked to suppose it, and where we hung 
about helplessly enough for recreation — a brown- 
ish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of 
youthfulness, mentioned to me with an air that 
comes back as that of the liveliest informational 
resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful 
Mutiny in India, where his mihtary parents, who 
had not so long before sent him over thence, with 
such weakness of imagination, as I measured it, to 
the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal 
danger of their Hves; so that news of their having 
been killed would perhaps be already on the way. 
They might well have been military, these impres- 
sively exposed characters, since my friend's name 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 403 

was Napier, or Nappie as he was called at the 
school, and since, I may add also, there attached 
to him, in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether 
new emphasis of type. The English boys within 
our ken since our coming abroad had been of the 
fewest — the Fezandie youths, whether English or 
American, besides being but scantly boys, had been 
so lost, on that scene, in our heap of disparities; 
and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own 
that those we had known in New York, and all 
aware of their varieties and "personaHties" as one 
had supposed one's self, had in no case challenged 
the restless "placing" impulse with any such force 
as the finished little Nappie. They had not been, 
as he was by the very perversity of his finish, re- 
sultants of forces at all — or comparatively speak- 
ing; it was as if their producing elements had been 
simple and few, whereas behind this more mixed 
and, as we have learnt to say, evolved companion 
(his very simpKcities, his gaps of possibility, being 
still evolved), there massed itself I couldn't have 
said what protective social order, what tangled cre- 
ative complexity. Why I should have thought 
him almost Indian of stamp and hue because his 
English parents were of the so general Indian peril 
is more than I can say; yet I have his exotic and 
above all his bold, his imaginably even *'bad," 
young face, finely unacquainted with law, before 
me at this hour quite undimmed — announcing, as 



/ 
\ 



404 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

I conceived it, and quite as a shock, any awful ad- 
venture one would, as well as something that I must 
even at the time have vaguely taken as the play of 
the "passions." He vanishes, and I dare say I but 
make him over, as I make everything; and he must 
have led his life, whatever it was to become, with 
the least possible waiting on the hour or the major 
consequence and no waste of energy at all in 
mooning, no patience with any substitute for his 
very own humour. We had another schoolmate, 
this one native to the soil, whose references were 
with the last vividness local afid who was yet to 
escape with brilliancy in the af tertime the smallest 
shadow of effacement. His most direct reference 
at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's 
of the town, an establishment we then found su- 
preme for little criss-crossed apple tartlets and 
melting babas — young Coquelin's home life amid 
which we the more acutely envied that the upward 
cock of his so all-important nose testified, for my 
fancy, to the largest range of free familiar sniffing. 
C.-B. Coquelin is personally most present to me, in 
the form of that hour, by the value, as we were to 
learn to put it, of this nose, the fine assurance and 
impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet for 
promises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it 
were, of his long career as the mqst interesting and 
many-sided comedian, or at least most unsurpassed 
dramatic diseur of his time, I failed to doubt that, 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 405 

with the rich recesses of the parental industry for 
his background, his subtlest identity was in his 
privilege, or perhaps even in his expertest trick, of 
helping himself well. 

These images, however, were but drops in the 
bucket of my sense of catching character, round- 
about us, as I say, at every turn and in every as- 
pect; character that began even, as I was pleased 
to think, in our own habitation, the most spacious 
and pompous Europe had yet treated us to, in 
spite of its fronting on the Rue Neuve Chaussee, a 
street of lively shopping, by the measure of that 
innocent age, and with its own ground-floor occu- 
pied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile 
articles de Paris. Modern and commodious itself, 
it looked from its balcony at serried and mis- 
matched and quaintly-named haunts of old pro- 
vincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently 
eager, traffic; but this made, among us, for much 
harmless inquisitory life — while we were fairly as- 
saulted, at home, by the scale and some of the 
striking notes of our fine modernity. The young, 
the agreeable (agreeable to anything), the appar- 
ently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage — wasn't it? — 
had not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the 
place as a monument of "family,*' quite modestly 
local yet propitious family, ambition; with an am- 
ple extension in the rear, and across the clearest 
prettiest court, for his own dwelling, which thus 



iV. 



406 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

became elegant, entre cour et jardin, and showed 
all the happy symmetries and proper conventions. 
Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time 
of day, here languished, a domestic drama of which 
we enjoyed the murmurous overflow: frankly as- 
tounding to me, I confess, how I remain still in sen- 
sitive presence of our resigned proprietor's domestic 
drama, in and out of which I see a pair of figures 
quite up to the dramatic mark flit again with their 
air of the very rightest finish. I must but note 
these things, none the less, and pass; for scarce an- 
other item of the whole Boulogne concert of salient 
images failed, after all, of a significance either still 
more strangely social or more distinctively spec- 
tacular. These appearances indeed melt together 
for my interest, I once more feel, as, during the in- 
terminable stretch of the prescribed and for the 
most part solitary airings and outings involved in 
my slow convalescence from the extremity of fever, 
I approached that straitened and somewhat be- 
darkened issue of the Rue de I'Ecu (was it.'') to- 
ward the bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port 
just where Merridew's English Library, solace of 
my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of 
deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. 
Here, frankly, discrimination drops — every par- 
ticular in the impression once so quick and fresh 
sits interlinked with every other in the large lap 
of the whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 407 

Port, with its classic, its admirable fisher-folk of 
both sexes, models of type and tone and of what 
might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered 
condition, would have seemed the straightest ap- 
peal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayan side, 
as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered 
wealth of illustration of his sharpest satiric range, 
not so constantly interposed and competed with it. 
The scene bristled, as I look back at it, with images 
from Men's Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuce- 
ace and that of fifty other figures of the same 
creation, with Bareacreses and Rawdon Crawleys 
and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of 
a more or less crumpled freshness and blighted 
bloom, with battered and bent, though doubtless 
never quite so fine. Colonel Newcomes not less; 
with more reminders in short than I can now gather 
in. Of those forms of the seedy, the subtly sinister, 
the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged and 
desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly 
impudent, all the marks, I feel sure, were stronger 
and straighter than such as we meet in generally 
like cases under our present levelling light. Such 
anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such bra- 
zen, bluflSng, swaggering gentlemen, such flor- 
idly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as 
hard as they could as if they were there for mere 
harmless amusement — it was as good, among 
them, as just being Arthur Pendennis to know so 



408 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what 
they might be. They were floated on the tide of 
the manners then prevailing, I judge, with a rich 
processional effect that so many of our own grand 
lapses, when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave 
no material for; so that the living note of Boulogne 
was really, on a more sustained view, the opposi- 
tion between a native race the most happily tem- 
pered, the most becomingly seasoned and salted and 
self-dependent, and a shifting colony — so far as 
the persons composing it could either urgently or 
speculatively shift — inimitably at odds with any 
active freshness. And the stale and the light, even 
though so scantly rebounding, the too densely so- 
cialised, group was the English, and the "positive" 
and hardy and steady and wind-washed the French; 
and it was all as flushed with colour and patched 
with costume and referable to record and picture, 
to literature and history, as a more easily amusing 
and less earnestly uniform age could make it. 
When I speak of this opposition indeed I see it 
again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one 
side and the other, swallowed all differences at a 
gulp. The general British show, as we had it there, 
in the artless mid- Victorian desert, had, I think, for 
its most sweeping sign the high assurance of its 
dowdiness; whereas one had only to glance about 
at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were the real 
strength of the place to feel them shed at every 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 409 

step and by their every instinct of appearance the 
perfect lesson of taste. There it was to be learnt 
and taken home — with never a moral, none the 
less, drawn from it by the "higher types." I speak 
of course in particular of the tanned and trussed 
and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, 
all so short-skirted and free-hmbed under stress; 
for as by the rule of the dowdy their sex is ever 
the finer example, so where the sense of the suitable, 
of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, 
they preserve the pitch even as a treasure com- 
mitted to their piety. To hit that happy mean of 
rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home- 
mother and a fishwife, to be in especial both so 
bravely stripped below and so perfectly enveloped 
above as the deep-wading, far-striding, shrimp- 
netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who 
played, waist-high, with the tides and racily quick- 
ened the market, was to make grace thoroughly 
practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. These 
attributes had with them all, for the eye, however, 
a range too great for me to follow, since, as their 
professional undress was a turn-out positively self- 
consistent, so their household, or more responsibly 
public, or altogether festal, array played through 
the varied essentials of fluted coif and folded ker- 
chief and sober skirt and tense, dark, displayed 
stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say noth- 
ing of long gold ear-drop or solid short-hung pecto- 



\ 



410 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

ral cross, with a respect for the rigour of conven- 
tions that had the beauty of self-respect. 

I owe to no season of the general period such 
a preserved sense of innumerable unaccompanied 
walks — at the reason of which luxury of freedom I 
have glanced; which as often as not were through 
the steep and low-browed and brightly-daubed 
ruelles of the fishing-town and either across and 
along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff be- 
yond; this latter the site of the first Napoleon's so 
tremendously mustered camp of invasion, with a 
monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that 
enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special 
accent I could ask for. Or I was as free for the 
haute ville and the ramparts and the scattered, bat- 
tered benches of reverie — if I may so honour my 
use of them; they kept me not less complacently 
in touch with those of the so anciently odd and 
mainly contracted houses over which the stiff cita- 
del and the ghost of Catherine de Medicis, who 
had dismally sojourned in it, struck me as throwing 
such a chill, and one of which precisely must have 
witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten Campaigner's 
passage in respect to her cold beef. Far from ex- 
tinct for me is my small question of those hours, 
doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as 
to what human Hfe might be tucked away in 
such retreats, which expressed the last acceptance 
whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so abso- 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 411 

lutely appointed and obliged did I feel to make out, 
so far as I could, what, in so significant a world, they 
on their part represented. I think the force mainly 
sustaining me at that rather dreary time — as I 
see it can only show for — was this lively felt need 
that everything should represent something more 
than what immediately and all too blankly met 
the eye; I seem to myself to have carried it about 
everywhere and, though of course only without out- 
ward signs that might have betrayed my fatuity, 
and insistently, quite yearningly applied it. What I 
wanted, in my presumption, was that the object, 
the place, the person, the unreduced impression, of- 
ten doubtless so difficult or so impossible to reduce, 
should give out to me something of a situation; 
living as I did in confused and confusing situa- 
tions and thus hooking them on, however awk- 
wardly, to almost any at all living surface I chanced 
to meet. My memory of Boulogne is that we had 
almost no society of any sort at home — there ap- 
pearing to be about us but one sort, and that of 
far too great, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. 
Yet there were occasional figures that I recover 
from our scant circle and that I associate, whatever 
links I may miss, with the small still houses on the 
rampart; figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps 
the frowsiest, little English ladies in such mush- 
room hats, such extremely circular and bestriped 
scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, 



/ 
\ 



412 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

such explicit claims to long descent, which showed 
them for everything that everyone else at Boulogne 
was not. These mid- Victorian samples of a per- 
fect consistency "represented," by my measure, as 
hard as ever they could — and represented, of all 
things, literature and history and society. The lit- 
erature was that of th^ three-volume novel, then, 
and for much after, enjoying its loosest and se- 
renest spread; for they separately and anxiously 
and awfully "wrote" — and that must almost by 
itself have amounted in them to all the history I 
evoked. 

The dreary months, as I am content that in their 
second phase especially they should be called, are 
subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quite perhaps 
to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered 
health — which should keep me from being too 
sure of these small proportions of experience — I 
was to look back afterwards as over so grey a 
desert; through which, none the less, there flush as 
sharp little certainties, not to be disallowed, such 
matters as the general romance of Merridew, the 
English Librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth 
of the Port; a connection that thrusts itself upon 
me now as after all the truest centre of my per- 
ceptions — waylaying my steps at the time, as I 
came and went, more than any, other object or 
impression. The question of what that spot rep- 
resented, or could be encouraged, could be aided 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 413 

and abetted, to represent, may well have supremely 
engaged me — for depth within depth there could 
only open before me. The place ** meant," on these 
terms, to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, 
licensed to my recordedly relaxed state; and what 
this particular luxury represented it might have 
taken me even more time than I had to give to 
make out. The blest novel in three volumes ex- 
ercised through its form, to my sense, on grounds 
lying deeper for me to-day than my deepest sound- 
ing, an appeal that fairly made it do with me what 
it would. Possibly a drivelling confession, and the 
more drivelling perhaps the more development I 
should attempt for it; from which, however, the 
very difficulty of the case saves me. Too many 
associations, too much of the ferment of memory 
and fancy, are somehow stirred; they beset me 
again, they hover and whirl about me while I 
stand, as I used to stand, within the positively sanc- 
tified walls of the shop (so of the vieux temps now 
their aspect and fashion and worked system: by 
which I mean again of the frumpiest and civillest 
mid-Victorian), and surrender to the vision of the 
shelves packed with their rich individual trinities. 
Why should it have affected me so that my choice, 
so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for a 
trinity .f^ I am unable fully to say — such a magic 
dwelt in the mere rich fact of the trio. When the 
novel of that age was "bad," as it so helplessly, so 



414 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

abjectly and prevailingly consented to be, the 
three volumes still did something for it, a something 
that was, all strangely, not an aggravation of its 
case. When it was "good" (our analysis, our 
terms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has 
lingered on) they made it copiously, opulently bet- 
ter; so that when, after the span of the years, my 
relation with them became, from that of compara- 
tively artless reader, and to the effect of a superior 
fondness and acuteness, that of complacent author, 
the tradition of infatuated youth still flung over 
them its mantle: this at least till all relation, by 
one of the very rudest turns of life we of the pro- 
fession were to have known, broke ojff, in clumsy 
interfering hands and with almost no notice given, 
in a day, in an hour. Besides connecting me with 
the lost but unforgotten note of waiting service 
and sympathy that quavered on the Merridew air, 
they represented just for intrinsic charm more than 
I could at any moment have given a plain account 
of; they fell, by their ineffable history, every trio 
I ever touched, into the category of such prized 
phenomena as my memory, for instance, of fairly 
hanging about the Rue des Vieillards, at the season 
I speak of, through the apprehension that some- 
thing vague and sweet — if I shouldn't indeed 
rather say something of infinite .future point and 
application — would come of it. This is a remi- 
niscence that nothing would induce me to verify, as 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 415 

for example by any revisiting light; but it was going 
to be good for me, good, that is, for what I was 
pleased to regard as my intelHgence or my imagi- 
nation, in fine for my obscurely specific sense of 
things, that I should so have hung about. The 
name of the street was by itself of so gentle and 
intimate a persuasion that I must have been 
ashamed not to proceed, for the very grace of it, 
to some shade of active response. And there was 
always a place of particular arrest in the vista 
brief and blank, but inclusively blank, blank after 
ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things, 
blank almost, in short, with all Matthew Arnold's 
"ennui of the middle ages," rather than, poorly 
and meanly and emptily, before such states, which 
was previously what I had most known of blank- 
ness. This determined pause was at the window 
of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no ampH- 
tude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confi- 
dence, where, among a few artists' materials, an 
exhibited water-colour from some native and pos- 
sibly then admired hand was changed but once in 
ever so long. That was perhaps after all the pivot 
of my revolution — the question of whether or no 
I should at a given moment find the old picture 
replaced. I made this, when I had the luck, pass 
for an event — yet an event which would have to 
have had for its scene the precious Rue des Vieil- 
lards, and pale though may be the recital of such 



/ 

\ 



416 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

pleasures I lose myself in depths of kindness for 
my strain of ingenuity. 

All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, 
leaves small allowance for my service to good M. 
Ansiot, rendered while my elder and younger 
brothers — the younger completing our group of 
the ungovernessed — were continuously subject 
to coUegial durance. Their ordeal was, I still 
blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as com- 
pared with mine, during our longer term of thrifty 
exile from Paris — the time of stress, as I find I 
recall it, when we had turned our backs on the 
Rue Montaigne and my privilege was so to roam 
on the winter and the spring afternoons. Mild M. 
Ansiot, "under" whom I for some three hours each 
forenoon sat sole and underided — and actually by 
himself too — was a curiosity, a benignity, a futility 
even, I gather; but save for a felt and remembered 
impulse in me to open the window of our scene of 
study as soon as he had gone was in no degree an 
ideal. He might rise here, could I do him justice, 
as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, 
to be frank, who most literally smelt of the vieux 
temps — as to which I have noted myself as won- 
dering and musing as much as might be, with re- 
covered scraps and glimpses and other intimations, 
only never yet for such a triumph of that particular 
sense. To be still frank, he was little less than a 
monster — for mere unresisting or unresilient mass 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 417 

of personal presence I mean; so that I fairly think 
of him as a form of bland porpoise, violently blow- 
ing in an age not his own, as by having had to ex- 
change deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed 
me as with an absolute ancientry of type, of tone, 
of responsible taste, above all; this last I mean in 
literature, since it was literature we sociably ex- 
plored, to my at once charmed and shamed appre- 
hension of the several firm traditions, the pure pro- 
prieties, the discussabilities, in the oddest way both 
so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed 
to his pious view. I must have had hold, in this 
mere sovereign sample of the accidentally, the 
quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all 
negligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare 
case of the provincial and academic cuistre; though 
even while I record it I see the good man as too 
helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his 
poor facts of person and circumstance, of over- 
grown time of life alone, to incur with justness 
the harshness of classification. He rested with a 
weight I scarce even felt — such easy terms he 
made, without scruple, for both of us — on the 
cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though 
our mornings were short and subject, I think, to 
quite drowsy lapses and other honest aridities, we 
did scumble together, I make out, by the aid of 
the collected extracts from the truly and academi- 
cally great which formed his sole resource and 



418 A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 

which he had, in a small portable and pocketed 
library rather greasily preserved, some patch of 
picture of a saving as distinguished from a losing 
classicism. The point remains for me that when 
all was said — and even with everything that might 
directly have counted unsaid — he discharged for 
me such an office that I was to remain to this far-off 
hour in a state of possession of him that is the very 
opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion again in 
which I had all along and elsewhere suffered and 
resisted, and yet so perversely and intimately ap- 
propriated, tutoring; which was with as little as 
ever to show for my profit of his own express show- 
ings. The blank he fills out crowds itself with a 
wealth of value, since I shouldn't without him have 
been able to claim, for whatever it may be worth, a 
tenth (at that let me handsomely put it), of my 
"working" sense of the vieux temps. How can I 
allow then that we hadn't planted together, with a 
loose fehcity, some of the seed of work? — even 
though the sprouting was so long put off. Every- 
thing, I have mentioned, had come at this time to 
be acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; 
and the ministrations of M. Ansiot really wash 
themselves over with the weak mixture that had 
begun to spread for me, to immensity, during that 
summer day or two of our earlier, residence when, 
betraying strange pains and apprehensions, I was 
with all decision put to bed. Present to me still 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 419 

is the fact of my sharper sense, after an hour or 
two, of my being there in distress and, as happened 
for the moment, alone; present to me are the sounds 
of the soft afternoon, the mild animation of the 
Boulogne street through the half -open windows; 
present to me above all the strange sense that 
something had begun that would make more differ- 
ence to me, directly and indirectly, than anything 
had ever yet made. I might verily, on the spot, 
have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to 
something suddenly queer, the whole large extent 
of it. I must thus, much impressed but half 
scared, have wanted to appeal; to which end I 
tumbled, all too weakly, out of bed and wavered 
toward the bell just across the room. The question 
of whether I really reached and rang it was to re- 
main lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of 
everything about me, under which I fell into a 
lapse of consciousness that I shall conveniently 
here treat as a considerable gap. 

THE END 



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